


A Feral Soul Walks a Burning Path

by ClutchKey



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anti-Faunus Racism (RWBY), F/F, F/M, Feral Behavior, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:09:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClutchKey/pseuds/ClutchKey
Summary: One of them had listened to her instincts to run a lot sooner, and so she did, away from her past, away from her life. Only a new life isn't what she found, bound by fear and the all encompassing will to survive. She didn't need the Academies, she'd sacrificed too much already to risk being a huntress, and she was too ashamed to return home. All there was anymore was tomorrow, and her ability to rise and greet it.The other was a fractured person wearing the face of someone far more whole. A broken hero was still broken, but the world moved on and forgot, leaving her alone in a cage with no bars, with thoughts of betrayals and what-might-have-beens, she can still identify something deep down, burning, consuming, and hoping to roar back to life before it gets snuffed out completely.A beast borne of guilt.A fighter bent by abandonment.Years after Salem's defeat, they can walk the path to recovery together, or surrender themselves to a mutual end.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Adam Taurus (past), Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Trifa/Yang Xiao Long (Past)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 46





	1. The Feral

She had grown up in the sun and heat, a person borne of the sun, sand and palm trees that some often referred to as the staples of the paradise that was Menagerie. Oft-forgetting that to even make the smallest continent of Remnant livable required a hugely concentrated effort that spat directly in the eye of what was cynically - and rightly - considered a _token_ act of appreciation by humanity.

A consolation prize for daring to exist in humanity’s world.

It had been a long road to make it livable, and an even longer time for her people to make it home, but by the time she was birthed in the tropical epicenter of Menagerian society known as Kuo Kuana, that’s exactly what it was.

There’s a part of her that, even now, she misses terribly. The scent of sand and salt drifting in off of cold ocean waves, the unguarded animal traits of her fellow faunus, several years ago these thoughts would bring with them pangs of remembrance and nostalgia, screaming to the forefront of her heart and mind.

Now though, all she can think of is how much easier it would be to simply survive in said climate.

She’d long ago forgotten how long she’d been out in the wilds as she was, originally tracking days and weeks through the years soon faded into a pointless blur. Days became pointless when it was _seasons_ that truly mattered. When did the winter snow thaw? When did the wild flora and fauna start to grow and struggle for life with spring’s gentle caress? At what point under the summer sun should she begin to hunt, travel and repair or build her next temporary home? How far into autumn’s chilling touch should she start to consolidate food and supplies to make it through the long, cold period of death that came after.

The details were hazy, if unimportant, in her memory as she stepped carefully through the snow, fur-wrapped feet stepping lightly into the slight indentations of where she’d stepped the previous day, taking care to avoid disturbing the silent frozen landscape any more than she had to. She’d arrived here maybe two winters previously, maybe three? It was a small, overlooked island that seemed largely unassuming, just riding north west along the coast of what she could vaguely recall being the Vale.

Getting to the island had proven to be far more difficult than the act of living there though, so in the end it had been worth it. Amongst the coastal cities that dotted the coast sporadically, the population was mercifully small, and consisted of those that simply wanted a peaceful life. She swore she used to know the name of it, but to devote any time trying to glean that bit of pointless information from her atrophied recollection was to invite carelessness.

Carelessness could get her killed at any moment.

Getting to Vale alone was a trek unto itself, born from an instinctual knowledge that what she feared most lay behind her, but always felt like it was in pursuit. She’d spent a long time struggling for existence in the humid climbs of the Mistrali western coast, occasionally doubling back through the mountainous regions in the central area of the continent of Anima to lose the trail of any undesirables.

There was a small, vindictive part of her that felt smugly satisfied that she might be considered in the same hushed whispers as a legend or monster of Mistrali folklore amongst several of the bandit tribes that called the lawless Mistrali wilds their home. The mild satisfaction would be grudging though, as there were scars that littered her body from those same bandits, telling the story of vicious, drag-out shadows of combat and intense violence that told the story far better than her mind or mouth could.

All she could clearly remember is that what blood was on her hands was spilt out of survival, the fact that she was still breathing and they were not being as far as her mind needed to go to justify the violence and death she’d visited on more than one person she’d encountered in her life.

On the subject of death, there simply was none to be traced on the air as she closed in on her destination, a copse of trees stuck deep in a gully that in warmer times had been surrounded by several den holes, voles, hares and even the odd wild fox family. Her stomach growls at the remembrance of meat, something that had eluded her palette as the snow had piled up over the past several nightfalls.

The lack of death she breathes in is concerning, disheartening. There’s no tang of iron blood, no sour twist of offal or even a single trace of bowels to tell of the fatal outcome of an animal caught in any of her snares and traps. Still she ventures forward, feline ears twisting back and forth with practised frequency, ignoring the icy chill of winter to keep her survival instincts sharp, her amber eyes continue to scan the plumes of white snow, hoping for something to track.

She crouches down with practised ease, the cracking of her left knee causing her to wince at the sudden, intrusive noise that pervaded the silence of the forest in winter.

Not hearing the telltale shuffle of feet running, startled from the unfortunate noise, she exhales in relief before making eye contact with the snare she’d set between two wilting coniferous trees, the hardier brush hanging off it’s branches giving the illusion of the space being safe, untouched, _wild_. The sort of hiding place a wild animal wouldn’t even think to suspect death lurked.

_Yet, it was empty._

If she had any certainty in her ability to verbalize her displeasure these days, she’d have cursed up a storm, but she hadn’t gotten as far as she had out here by giving herself away to any secondary or even tertiary opportunities to succeed, there might be something else out her to sate her hunger, so she kept quiet.

She kept the idea that she herself could possibly be a being to satiate something _else’s_ hunger from flashing across her mind with a practised ease. She’d learned that lesson the hard way: The mindset of survival brought only safety, a mindset of fear brought something far worse.

While this small, snowy island hadn’t yielded any of the Grimm for her to combat with in a long, _long_ time, she was content to leave fighting the monstrous creatures to Academy students, regional militaries, and anyone else who lacked the instincts to keep from summoning with their negative emotions and lack of self-awareness.

Her lip curls at the flash of a distant memory, an unnamed settlement littered with the remains of those that hadn’t been as good at surviving as she, and the echo of guilt that had stung her at the time as she ransacked what had remained for useful supplies in the wake of that massacre.

She shakes her head fiercely, dispelling it as nothing more than an idle snapshot of someone else’s life, it wasn’t _needed_ now, it didn’t add anything to her current situation. Experience aided her in making it through to the next day alive, memories, anecdotes and imaginations did nothing but distract.

Her ear twitches as something close moves, the sound so minute, so _sleight_ , that she’s certain had she not gotten her head out of the clouds she might never have picked it out. 

She shuffles in closer to the tree beside her then, stance lowering even further to the ground, trying to let the furs she’s bound in help her to blend into the wilde, natural aesthetic of nature around her even as her leg responds and argues in protest. She ignores the sharp throb and focuses on slowing her breathing, while at the same time giving shallow exhales, causing the normal voluminous cloud of vapor in the chilled sub-temperature air to thin and evaporate all the quicker.

There it is again, a sound that starts as a soft, barely there thud, but is punctuated with the telltale crunch of shifting snow, meaning that whatever it was, it was heavier than any of the burrowing creatures she’d expected to find, yet was far too delicate and cautious to be something more dangerous than she herself was.

It wasn’t human, and it wasn’t Grimm. Regardless of what it was, she understood that meant it was _food_ , as long as she was precise, careful, and lucky.

Under her furs her hand slowly drops to the waistband of what could only be referred to as her bottoms, having long ago run out of the means or cares to dress in produced clothing and instead making due with whatever she managed to skin and salvage from the world around her. Her hands meet the familiar indent of cold steel. The only friend she’d managed to keep throughout her survival, for even with the fact that it was broken, nicked and warped, it was still a thing that kept her alive to this very day, it promised the following day, and so far, it had yet to break it’s word.

She slips the blade from her waist and slowly extends her arm out from underneath her furs and into the bitter chill of a slow, albeit biting breeze, the dulled edge of the blade cupped in a scarred palm to hide any glint off the metal, with her other hand she unwinds an old fishing line from around her wrist and slowly brings the pre-tied loop she’d formed at the end around the makeshift handle of her friend.

Another sound, much closer and clearer now. Her amber eyes stare out unblinking, defying the sting of the refracting light off the snow and the chilled air combined, her narrowing pupils trace the ridge, anticipating that the clarity in her prey’s meant that it was getting closer to her line of sight as any obstacles or features that would mute the sound became less and less, she waited.

A slight sniff of the air gave her a general approximation of exactly where the animal would walk into her view, smelled like it was a deer, it had been too long since she’d managed to snag one to determine if it was a buck, doe or fawn, but in her state she would take what she could get. There’s a brief spike of worry that her stomach, aching at the sort of emptiness only eating broth once every other day led to, might rumble and give her away.

Luckily, her stomach locked with anticipation like the rest of her body as the head of the animal darted out beside a fallen pine, it’s body shielded by a snow drift.

The animal side of her wanted to dart out right then, to pursue her meal with all the fervor and athleticism that her body used to hold. She wanted to hunt in the old way, a way that simply wasn’t possible when one was filled with deeper concerns like continuing to function with several untreated injuries, exhaustion and near starvation.

Instead she waits, squashing down those old feelings, blocking out any possibility of yearning for what once might have been. Amber eyes dart back and forth, cataloguing where her snares and deadfalls lay, mapping out the possible routes it might take past her.

As it trails along the copse, skirting the edge of the tree line, more details become apparent to her. There’s no antlers, so it was a female deer, a doe, possibly in its third or fourth season given its size, and the scent of it didn’t carry any hint of sickness or rot, which was a relief. The odds of any ticks being on its body were near zero in the cold weather but she’d still cautiously check just in case.

There was a time where she’d have eaten any animal with impunity and left her aura to deal with the consequences, the reflection of her soul having more than enough strength to ward off sickness, but aura was a gift far more easily accessible for those that had certain luxuries she no longer did.

A good diet and rest were necessary components for recharging one’s aura, and she hadn’t known exactly how _vital_ they were until she’d spent the better part of a month somewhere along the Anima mountain ranges a long time ago, unable to keep anything down and projecting waste out of both ends.

Experience may have meant survival, but often that experience was hard won.

She’s almost vibrating with anticipation as the doe wanders ever closer, mouth watering at the mere prospect of meat. The animal’s intelligent, observant eyes scan about the copse, but there’s an air of impatience to it’s safety check, as it gets closer it becomes apparent why, the light protrusions of ribs giving away that it too, was suffering through the season’s brutal fast.

That realization did nothing to dampen her spirits, there was more than enough meat on those bones to keep her sated for two weeks, three if she showed restraint, and that was at least two weeks of breathing room to widen her net and her hunting grounds to catch something else in the meantime, she just needed breathing room, but this doe was a veritable bounty of good fortune.

Which might have been why things turned to shit in short order.

The prey was within ten meter of where she was and she allowed her blade to slowly slide until the makeshift handle of her friend rested comfortably in her hand, her other hand meanwhile slowly unwound the remainder of the fishing line she’d tied to the end of her blade, giving her a light anchor point with which to whip the blade around should the deer prove to have quicker reflexes than she’d estimated.

Nine meters and she starts channeling a bit of aura into her injured knee, a chronic injury that had been ailing her for a long period of the Valean winter, it needed to be painless, ready to spring when the rest of her body was. The most important move in a hunt like this was the very first, she couldn’t have anything slowing her down or she’d fail and spend the night hungry.

At six meters her knee has felt the best it has in a while, but the anticipation of her lunge has her struggling to simultaneously keep her body in check and her breath steady.

**_At five meters she lunges._ **

**Bang.**

A lot of things happen at once as she makes her move. She feels her knee pop in protest, but still hold, she sees the doe recoil at the explosion of snow and movement that marks her arrival, the flash of an unseen muzzle in the distance startles her just as badly as she had her pray then, the crack of a single shot from a hunting rifle rippling through the entirety of her body and sending every nerve aflame, every hair on edge and a growl tearing from her throat as she almost tastes the electricity of genuine terror for the first time in a very long time.

The scent of iron hits her nose before the realization that she’s been hit, followed by the unmistakable smell of maleness, _human maleness._

She whirls around, the hunt forgotten even as the doe recoils, the shot that had tagged her left arm having passed cleanly through her former prey’s flank. How could she not smell a human on the wind? How could she not realize that a prey as bountiful as this would no doubt be stalked by another hunter? This wasn’t an error in judgement, this was a cataclysmic fucking _failure_ and she needed to leave.

“H-holy shit, hey wait!” The voice cracks, concern and fear painting a tone rippling with the throes of puberty as the rifle-wielder moves forward on snowshoed feet through deep, unbroken snow.

He’s too slow to gain any ground against someone of her experience and she knows it, but her instincts are screaming out warnings to her as she turns away, expecting a second shot to ring out and drop her permanently and she abandons utilizing her previously broken path and instead breaks new ground. Her knee is back to protesting, popping and grinding cruelly but thankfully the adrenaline keeps the pain muted, dulled by survival instinct.

She’s weaving between trees, fuzzy but familiar in her periphery as she dodges left and right, breaking through dead shrubbery in some areas and bypassing it completely in others. Her ears swivel and her nose takes in the scents around her, trying to locate if there were any other humans maybe trying to head off her escape. She only vaguely picks up the distant sounds of the human shouting, clumsy footsteps echoing through the trees faintly.

A few hundred meters more and she’s scaling a birch, her blade, _her only friend_ , digging into the wood so she can grasp her way up to heightened branches before skillfully leaping into the next tree, and then the next. She knows these forests, she’s survived in them so long that even with her bum knee and wounded arm she can navigate with a practised ease, she occasionally moves from east to west at random, taking minutes to double back south and creating a difficult path for even the most skilled of woodsmen to glean.

She sees a large, dead elm that speaks of her current home and almost cries in relief at how beautiful and _safe_ it looks. A moment later she’s scaling the length of it up to a rocky outcropping of a plateau that hangs out over the ocean itself. A tiny, near invisible lip that she’d found by happenstance shortly after her arrival to the island. 

Confident steps and immaculate balance bring her around to the hole dug into the cliffside. Its construction was something of an anomaly given that it wasn’t a naturally formed cave, but the craftsmanship of it spoke of a simple, measured hand. She’d never truly taken the time to worry about it though, it was by far one of the roomiest caves she’d managed to find safe harbor in, it had long fallen into disuse by whatever had tunneled it, and the animals that had been roosting there had been easy to drive off.

In short, it was as close to **_home_ ** as she’d had in a very long time.

She tosses a couple pieces of wood onto the embers of last night’s fire and quickly sets about getting the blaze going again to warm her weary bones, grateful to be there even as her stomach protests it’s emptiness and her body starts to weaken in fatigue and the low of her adrenaline levelling out.

She quickly peels off several layers of furs, draping them over an old rope near the fire before grabbing a couple dry ones and leaving them by the fire to sit down on, shivering but patiently waiting for the sweat on her skin to dry before she contemplate draping any more furs around her skin. 

Stretching her aching leg out, she winces at the jolt of pain that runs up the length of her leg from her knee, but when it fully extends and pops, she sighs in mild relief that her knee hadn’t in fact gotten any worse or locked up, with that cursory check done she turns her attention to her arm next.

A sigh escapes her at being able to confirm that it was just, in fact, a flesh wound, and one that was clotting with the aid of the cold weather, still, it needed to be cleaned. Her head swivels then, trying to remember where she kept the few civilization produced supplies she’d managed to carefully _acquire_ throughout her travels, having a rough idea, she leans back on her elbows and drags herself half heartedly to the pile of skins and furs that constituted her bedding, right hand diving into the depths of it she grunts with mild satisfaction before pulling out a small black lacquered box, as well as the drinking skin she’d left there in an attempt to keep the water inside from freezing during the night.

Shuffling quickly back over to the fire, she sets the box before her and digs out a small bottle of disinfected and some gauze. She washes away the rivulets of blood and the quickly setting scab, mind faintly recalling the times she learned first aid, how she wished then that she’d never have to use it. Somehow she manages to not sneer at the faint recollection of her old naivety.

The disinfectant goes on the wound next, drawing nothing more than a low growl from her throat and a wince, luckily she manages to keep herself from trying to lick the wound, an instinctual urge that still startles her but in almost all cases would do nothing good for her injuries. 

She places the gauze down next, holding it lightly on the wound with her right hand. She flips the medical kit open only to note with some severity that there were no other bandages or wraps around.

There’s a moment of indecision then, the wound itself was simple enough, but without food, she simply couldn’t waste the aura to ensure that infection didn’t set in, it needed to stay covered from the elements and bacteria that sought to infect it. She needed to use something to bind it up.

A moment goes by and she gives her head a shake, angry that her mind just simply isn’t as sharp as she knew it used to be. The person she was before mere survival had been clever, resourceful.

The person she was before would also be long dead, but that was beside the point.

She glances something dark out of the corner of her eye, resting against the scarred alabaster of her skin and her eyes focus on it then, momentarily worried that in her confusion she somehow missed a Grimm, animal or worse creeping into her lair. A quick rush of relief floods her once she realizes it was nothing more than her own black locks, knotted and scraggly, draped over her shoulder in the messy ponytail she kept the unruly bundle in…

… the unruly bundle gathered in a frayed length of black ribbon.

The idea clicks in and she’s untying her hair, restraining the grunts and whines that threaten to escape her as several strands of hair are yanked from her scalp in her excitement. The ribbon used to be a part of her blade, of _her friend_ , and she found that despite the silly sentiment, she simply couldn’t part with that part of her. Now seemingly that decision was paying off as the ribbon was wound over her arm, sealing the gauze to skin underneath it’s fabric as she ties it off.

It’s a strange feeling, the feel of the cascade of dark hair falling freely down her back, and seeing the ribbon that held so much familiarity in sight instead of entirely out of mind behind her head again. A shiver runs through her then and she grabs the fresh pelts around her and buries herself beneath them, watching the small, mercifully unobtrusive fire before her crackle with life-saving heat.

She’d have to melt down some more water and boil whatever remained of the previous week’s hare remains for yet another watery, unfulfilling stew, and there was more than a small part of her absolutely incensed that her hunt had been stolen from her, but sometimes survival was enough. 

She’d managed to escape, bandage her wounds, and live to see tomorrow. She would survive, as she had for a very long time now. Her eyes drag from the familiar ribbon bandaging her arm, to her only friend, the blade sitting beside her, and sighs as she leans back on the furs to let the exhaustion run over her for a short while.

It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t exactly living, but it was surviving.

  
Surviving was _good enough._


	2. Fading Flame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was no absolution for her, merely a life continuing well past it's necessity. Yang lives somewhere in between misery and acceptance of what she deems to be her lot in life. An existence continued with a grudging respect for those who simply hadn't, she reminisces inside her own mind, much as she has every night since the dust of a war she never chose had settled.
> 
> ... and why in the Dust-damned fuck is someone knocking on her door at this hour!?

My name is Yang Xiao Long.

I’m known by other, more fanciful monikers though, stuff that was _given_ to me both by people I’ve never met as well as some earned from people I’ll never **_forget_ **.

Almost all of them equal parts curse and gift the moment they hit my ear, which is to say nothing of all those times they don’t. Those times they’re exchanged knowingly between two people just out of earshot of me, or sang loud and raucous during a celebration I want nothing to do with.

They are names, they are titles. Tales unto themselves each and every single one, extolling the prowess of my combat abilities, the _linchpin_ my existence was in defeating a millennia-untold evil, the **_hero_ ** that deserved accolades and adulation for the sheer, unrepentant selflessness that drove me - and my team - forward through impossible odds and into victory, into history, into fucking **_legend._ **

The people on Patch know that I have neither the ears nor the heart for them, _usually._ Every once in a while some of the good ‘ol boys down at the pub get it into their head that maybe that day is _the day_ I’m willing to just accept the gratitude, or able to air out the cold, hard facts of what they consider the truth, the **_real_ ** story of what had happened the day Salem had met her end.

It turns out that every once in a while my eyes turn red, and the _dragon_ makes an appearance, a flash, stealing the words and the insistence of an answer they don’t want **or** deserve from liquor-boldened tongues.

I once thought myself immune to the sting each new name brought with it, chasing me through every small town, city, half-rebuilt academy and news channel as I made my way back to the island I called home. I’d even pretended to bask in it, as though they were badges of a job well done. Every syllable hitting me and sticking to my skin as though it was permanently stitched there. I remember the interviews, both from official and unofficial sources, some wielding cameras and some clutching scrolls as they fired through question after question at me.

I remember wondering, through the celebratory alcohol and the cloudy veneer of false pride, if any of them were going to ask the **_right_ ** questions. If they were going to mention the ones that didn’t make it, but were no less instrumental in victory. If the forgotten names in a war that transcended generations would ever be uttered, or if it rested with the others and myself to scream them from the rooftops.

I will never forget the bitter taste of knowing that those names, those people, weren’t forgotten in earnest malice, but were simply driven from the public mind because the people that we’d worked so hard to save simply couldn’t fathom how to unselfishly take the few minutes and hours of quiet reflection on the sacrifice lying in the graves of those that didn’t make it through.

I shouldn’t have been disgusted by the token, piecemeal level of attention those names and faces, those friends and allies, received as the celebrations wound down and the weeks passed. Those friends, those losses, they didn’t do what they did, they hadn’t died to gain some measure of fame and recognition, they’d been there fighting and bleeding, struggling against the machinations of a near infinitesimally powered Goddess of Destruction because it was the right thing to do.

Because Salem needed to be stopped.

Those people died, and slowly slipped from memory like the dead often do. Friends and allies, foes and villains, lost and damned into the annals of history alongside each other so it was an easier flavor across the public palette to move on.

Listen, I _get it_. Really I do. I live in a world that fought wars against itself to suppress arts and emotions so that the Grimm wouldn’t show up on their doorstep every hour of the day and slaughter thousands. It’s really the only way we of Remnant have been taught to deal with the trauma, to bury those emotions perceived as negative deep down, to reign them in and act like they’re not there.

It’s easy to understand why, in less than a months time after the war's end, the funerals of people like Oscar Pine and Nora Valkyrie were pushed all the way to page seven of the Atlas Tribune right behind the announcement of the Global CCT Expansion Act and a two-page ad proudly proclaiming the existence of the new Spruce Willis action vehicle that would be in theaters the following year.

Just because it’s easy to understand, doesn’t mean it isn’t so very hard to accept.

So I shut myself away here. The brawler who all those years ago became a huntress just so she could see the world and participate in adventures outside the norm, now returned home to embrace the very tedium she sought to escape. To revel in it, and to escape from the accusations that assailed my subconscious. 

_‘War makes victims of us all’_

An easy concept to pretend to get when I was struggling not to pass out during a lecture by Professor Port, sitting alongside my baby sister, an heiress and… _her_ , but infinitely more difficult to comprehend when you had people in the millions extolling your ability and bravery atop the graves of the forgotten.

How could those that didn’t live it truly understand? How could I tell them the truth, of how I felt, of how their hollow, empty names and accolades did nothing but intensify a guilt I simply didn’t want to bear? 

How did Yang Xiao Long look into the adoring eyes of an uncomprehending public and declare that I would trade places with any of the missing, blessed dead.

_Nora, Oscar,_ **_dad_ ** _, Yatsu, Neptune, Qrow, Maria…_

People with something to live for, the foundation for a brave new life in the ashes of what had been before so easy to grasp in their fingers. All gone, those possibilities stolen from them by battle and circumstance.

Then there was me.

The one who survived.

I talked with Weiss about it only once, when the weight of this new reality had enough time to truly settle in, for my mind to absorb the truths that my existence entailed. She had stayed up with me after the other survivors had went to bed, our get together a far more somber, reflective celebration of our victory, lacking the pomp and flair that had nearly engulfed the streets of Remnant in a joyful inferno of positivity and thereby being something so much better.

Whiskey had been my poison that night, as it has been for many nights since then, the crackle of the fireplace provided the only illumination to be had in the house since Ruby, Jaune and Ren had retreated to their beds for the night, casting everything in a soft orange glow that - in hindsight - might have been the last time colors appeared vivid to me in any way, and I was staring into the misty, concerned blue pools that comprised one of my dearest friend’s gaze.

I asked her then not to refute me, to let me get it all out, to air out the shadows and ghosts that had haunted my gaze for years at that point without interruption or recrimination, and Weiss, the beautiful snow-haired bitch? She granted me that mercy. Face a mask of practised neutrality and lips set in a line that was only betrayed by the emotions that ran through her stare, she let me speak unimpeded, let me work through my thoughts, let the alcohol loosen the reigns of my own mind.

Weiss sat there and bore witness to the demons I never divulged, the secrets and emotions I kept bound up and denied the existence of whenever she, my sister, or another concerned party asked, during those moments of weakness where the shadows broke through.

I told her how I felt like I had nothing to live for, about how the plan was never for me to actually _live_ through the conflict, but just to support my friends and family so that they might live through to the end of Salem’s tyranny. I told her how I wasn’t strong, I just pretended to be, a visage of competence and confidence to stand as a shield against the evils we faced while everyone got strong enough to bear the load themselves.

I tell her about how in the quiet hours, living alone in my family’s old home, I would sometimes hate myself through to the early morning just thinking about how unfair it was for me to still be here, to still have the possibilities of a life before me when there were so many better, more complete people that deserved that distinction.

I admit that there are moments of weakness where I’ve spent hours looking at some instrument of an unnatural end, thinking that maybe I could forget this guilt if I simply wasn’t around to remember it, but that the thoughts of those gone, of how honest, and true and _good_ they were meant that they’d never wish that upon me. That they deserved better from me.

I remember the unshed tears in those blue eyes at the admittance, but Weiss doesn’t speak, she keeps her words and she keeps her judgement locked inside. All for me. I can almost _hear_ her protests and admonishments throwing themselves bodily against the doors she locked them behind to grant me that single moment of true, unfiltered honesty.

I give her my thanks and a hug, my voice, normally so bland and droll these days, thick with emotion for the first time in a long time. I assured her that I had many years ahead of me, that I wouldn’t give into my guilt, that I’d try to recapture the zest for life I’d lost then.

I had no idea how I’d do that as I excused myself to go lay drunkenly in my room and stare at the ceiling until the ink-black darkness of night gave way to the sun.

I still have no idea how I can do that as I sit here in front of that same fireplace, alone and drunk once again, taking the occasional pull from my uncle’s familiar flask. The burn of a cheap single malt tingles down my throat but the view of the flask tickles at a sense of nostalgia that I appreciate far more than the taste of alcohol, even the echoes of longing and loneliness have their charm, proof that I still had the capacity for emotion.

Talking with a shrink hasn’t helped, nor did the additional fifteen I’ve visited during the following five-ish years since the end of the war. Every single one is a mixture of either the same tired, banal questions or looking at me with lien signs shining in their eyes, already plotting a thesis using my name and likeness to achieve accolades at my personal expense.

I’d been offered positions at all the Academies, the war having nearly wiped out and erased all the long-standing reserves that consisted of the last four generations of hunters and huntresses. Glynda Goodwitch herself approached me, extolling her pride and admiration, telling me that I was a symbol, an inspiration, that there were thousands of students that were willing to follow me into the mouth of hell itself because of my actions.

Every single compliment, followed by that knowing gleam in the Headmistress of Beacon’s eyes made me feel fraudulent and sick. I turned her down cold, but I still occasionally make myself known over at Signal Academy to have the occasional spar and offer guest lectures on unarmed combat…

… _no, I won’t make that joke._

Occupying my time with hobbies has yielded some more, uh, interesting results. I tried to maintain dad’s gardens initially and quickly found it distressing how bad I was at it, the wilting and dying vegetables and flowers all around the house taunting me like some cruel metaphor until I simply tore them up and put fresh sod down in their place to hide them.

I expected Ruby to be inconsolable when I told her about that, but she was just… _understanding_. I’m under no illusion that the night I talked with Weiss had eventually made its way to my sister’s ears, and thankfully it had yet to yield anything but consideration and understanding, even though we never talked about it.

Wood carving was a disaster, writing felt hollow, reading was far easier for me to indulge in with an audience - the by-product of helping raise Ruby, I suppose - and put me to sleep otherwise.

Eventually, I settled on something familiar. Bumblebee had died an ignoble death on the cliffs of Argus, a trade off in a pointless battle against one of Atlas’ seemingly _inexhaustible_ supply of sycophantic nutbars. The garage was still outfitted with the familiar tools of my teen years, working side by side with my dad on the bike I had adored so much, my prized possession. The oil spots that permanently stained the floor of the garage as familiar to me as the details of my own face.

It had been on a whim that I started ordering parts for a new bike, determined to make a new Bumblebee, not something stock, not something pre-built, but rather something better, more personal. Something that was undeniably _mine_.

A replacement for something I lost? Undoubtedly, but there is something I’ve always felt regarding mechanics that simply couldn’t be disregarded, something that made it special to me outside of the feeling of wind rushing through my hair when I rode my bike.

In constructing a motorcycle, _everything_ has a place in order to work. Every part has a location and - even with modifications and tuning - a need to be there. Every nut and bolt, every pipe and casing had a home on the frame of a well-operating machine.

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t grasped the metaphor.

The bike was almost done now, two years of trial and error as I constructed a monster of my own design, the smell of oil, the heat of my spot welder, the lingering taste of my favorite yellow paint in the air all filling me with some dull, unknowable ache through the previous summer's months when my package orders of new parts would be able to arrive in the mail. When spring hits it will finally be done.

What happens after that? No clue, I haven’t thought that far ahead. I don’t really have the urge to drive it anywhere, no place I’d like to go.

Outside of those precious moments working on the bike, I had something that erred on the side of an actual, honest-to-goodness job. 

Not that I needed it, the coffers ran deep between my father’s life insurance policy, living off-the-grid and within my means, and lastly, the vast quantities of lien that accumulated through literal years of non-stop missions and combat, while having neither the time nor opportunity to spend it.

It was just good to have **_something_ ** to do.

It was a secondary offer from Glynda, an olive branch extended to me even through the sting of my rejection of her offer to become an instructor at the academy, one that had been decided on by Vale’s council, who I must admit, either had an _in_ regarding my mental state these days, or were the most intuitive group of politicians that had ever existed.

Despite what I wanted, I was a celebrity, a recognizable face, a figurehead that provided something to the public, no matter how much I wished it wasn’t so. I was content to spend the rest of my life on Patch, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything I could provide.

The fall of Salem may have meant that Grimm simply had no way to be birthed into Remnant these days, but they still existed, they still attacked us, they still needed to be fended off and hunted down. I knew that clearly already, as Ruby, Weiss, Jaune and Penny had busied themselves with that arduous task almost immediately after our victory, pushing into territory that had long gone dark before recorded history and taking back the planet one battle at a time.

Grimm still slipped through the cracks though, made their way to occupied lands, to the front doorsteps of a populace that had suffered under their terror for far too long. Ruby and them might have been the spear, but who would be the shield for small, outlying communities like the island my sister and I had been raised on.

I think you can tell where I’m going with this.

Now they call me the Protector of Patch, a small burg with a population barely scratching five hundred people and a few outlying cabins just like my home. I _despise_ the addition of yet another worthless title to ride alongside my name like a benign tumor, but smashing Grimm into the dirt was always something of a cleansing experience for me.

So naturally, it has been literal months since any Grimm have made their presence known on the island. The last batch of the creatures that I had laid eyes on were fronted by an Alpha Ursa encroaching on the edges of the town proper

Luckily, nobody had been hurt or killed by the rampaging, bear-like monstrosity, I had been making a run into town for winter supplies at the time and was on the scene alongside other former hunters and huntresses within a matter of minutes, but there was damage. A chicken coop crushed here, the fence to a yard getting splintered apart there **_and_ ** , much to the chagrin of both myself and a group of Atlesian techs under Robyn Hill’s employ back up in Mantle, my combat ready arm broke from an accumulation of stress and impact when I punched my way through the hardened shell of the Alpha Ursa’s _‘mask’_ and killed it.

Almost seven years after it’s last upgrade, I’ll have to give it to Penny’s late father, Pietro, that man did not screw around when it came to building something that lasts.

I’d almost consider it a point of pride that I’d managed to, but I always had a knack for destruction. Beacon’s cafeteria, countless training halls, no less than three members of Ace Ops, almost the entirety of Mountain Glenn, and now the arm that replaced the one that had been taken by Adam Taurus and… **_her._ **

No, don’t do it tonight you idiot, don’t think about her. I have too much liquor in me to go down this road right now and-

_Eyes bordering between grey and blue, with hair to match, reaching down to a sleight jawline that contained a secretive grin._

\- I don’t need it. Just keep sipping this drink and reminiscing girl. It’s not worth it, _she’s_ not worth it, just breathe. Breathe and relax and-

_Alabaster skin is divided by dark lines, I’ve asked her so many times if they're natural or tattooed on and despite our closeness, she keeps the truth of that at bay, a secret from me, I find it as alluring as I do frustrating._

\- focus on what I’m good at. The good memories, the ones unmarred. Almost every other thing I’ve destroyed in my life has a story, an anecdote with a sense of humor. Like when I broke my arm as a kid trying to climb the apple tree around back, or when I wrecked Junior’s Bar- 

_I want to defend her, protect her, I love her. I step forward and see_ **_his_ ** _gloved hand go to his sword. Firing gauntlets behind me, the power of Ember Celica’s blast propels me toward the two, looking to help_ **_her_ ** _create distance, a chance to run, to break free from_ **_him._ **

-I’ve destroyed so much, but I never deserved this, did I? I don’t think so. There were times where I was in the wrong or overreacted, the anger of my youth driving my actions, but I never truly broke someone. Did I? I don’t- 

_The bite of his sword is so quick and so clean I don’t even realize what has happened until I see my right arm fall limply to the blacktop a few feet from me. My feet leave me as the shock sets in but I become aware that I can’t fall forward, something is holding me up._

\- remember. I don’t think so. I’m… just breathe, don’t let the black close in, they aren’t here. They won’t take anything more away from you. Just **_breathe goddammit._ ** I broke so much, I broke… they broke me. They broke me. _They broke me._ **_They broke-_ **

_The dagger in my torso slips free before plunging in again, once, twice, three times. I try to clutch weakly at the delicate, pale wrist holding it with my remaining hand as the pain shoots through the haze of shock until I look up and see_ **_her._ ** _Grey-blue eyes no longer holding the warmth I’d been counting on to see me through for months, instead there’s something else, something harder than steel. I feel when she cards_ **_her_ ** _fingers through my hair, a familiar gesture that I still find myself leaning into, adoring. Then I feel her wrench the dagger clear and fall forward, the black closing in before I have the chance to feel my face rebound off the pavement._

- **ME.** Yang Xiao Long

_The Sunny Little Dragon_

_The Bionic Blonde_

_The Invincible_

_The Protector Of Patch_

_The Foundation of Team R-_

The sound of solid knuckles pounding at the front door of the house is equal parts salvation and utter terror as I’m torn from the grasp of the panic that had gripped my heart. I bolt upright, hand reflexively shooting out as though to repel and drive back a memory I don’t think I’ll ever escape.

The details of my surroundings, the location of tonight’s reminiscence, comes back in gradients. Slipping from ill defined shapes and colors into stark, hard-edged detail as the combination of my episode and the tears unshed in my eyes clear up and get wiped away angrily. I see the fireplace, roaring as it always does in the winter months in Patch, I see the thin faded rug that protected my feet from the winter chill that lived within the oak floorboards, I see the head of a stag hung over the hearth, a gift from one of our neighbors years ago.

I see the pictures of friends and family - some still with us, most not - line the mantle. The accusations in their eyes purely being the work of my own stupid brain’s chemical imbalance, but causing me to shirk beneath their gaze regardless.

I see drops of scotch running in rivulets across the metal of the flask as well as my remaining flesh hand before dripping onto the carpeting and vanishing into the cloth.

A few seconds go by as my visual cortex processes all this and more while I focus on my breathing, counting to four on the inhale before holding it a moment, then exhaling, repeating the process as my heart slows, the thrumming of my pulse in my ears and the tingle of adrenaline in my blood petering out bit by bit.

It has been months since I had that recollection.

I want to scream in frustration at it’s return, but at this point, despite it’s now far-more-elusive nature, it was the sort of thing that would stick to me like my shadow or my eye color.

Okay, maybe my eye color is a bad example.

Sadly, it’s recurrence isn’t so surprising, with the lack of Grimm and my Bumblebee Two concept on the backburner due to the weather, I’d really been left with nothing to do save for the occasional trip into town to talk to what few actual friends remained on Patch, working out and bingeing whatever garbage happened to be available to stream from the CCT at the time. Leaving me with the problem of simply having too much free time for my subconscious mind to torment me.

Another series of knocks, this time far louder and more insistent startle me. Almost forgot about that, though I might just mouth-kiss whoever it is for pulling me out of my own head, regardless of how inappropriate it is to be bashing down my door at…

… _ten at night? Damn._

I’m immediately out of my seat and venturing through the house, setting the flask on a small hallway cupboard carefully, I make my way to the door steadily, having long ago _earned_ what good old Uncle Qrow would cheerfully dub as being my **drinking legs.**

A part of me wishes that I still kept a mirror by the door to fleece my appearance before answering, the memories of interviewers and fans without any concept of personal space banging down my door for months after Salem’s defeat having led to more than a few tabloid articles accusing me of descending into drug and pill addiction because I dared to make my face seen when I’d had a rough night’s sleep still stark in my mind.

Ruby’s scroll calls about them - and the ensuing torment and laughter - making them worth it notwithstanding, that is.

I open the door right before the teenager standing before me has the opportunity to go for his third set of knocks, leaving him standing there with his clenched fist raised and eyes wide as saucers.

“O-oh hello Miss Xiao Long” The teen boy starts, his face familiar until I manage to place him. He was the eldest son of one of the few farmers on the island, a decent kid, if a bit earnest. I can vaguely recall my father telling me that he’d been one of the kids sent home from Signal Academy when they’d learned how insubstantial his aura had been, and how the kid had accepted it with a quiet dignity, acknowledging that he’d be a burden if he attempted to subvert his lack of natural talent to become a huntsman.

“Yang’s fine, is this a Grimm call?” I’m impressed with my own ability to sound both casual and sober as I wave the kid inside, shutting the door behind him. I can’t help but grimace as I see the hunting rifle slung over his shoulder.

Sure it had been months since I’d seen any Grimm on Patch, but even then, it would be literal _generations_ until I’d recommend any non-Academy people to be wandering out in the wilds, alone and without Aura control, but despite my warnings and wishes, people still would.

As dad would say, you can protect people from anyone but themselves.

“Um, I don’t think so…” His voice cracks with equal parts uncertainty and pubescence. He stamps his feet, trying to get chilled blood circulating through his body while a gloved hand tears the beanie from off his head, freeing a wild mane of brown hair. He casts a look at me before looking away and - even though his face was long ago chapped red by the weather - I can pinpoint the tell of a teenager not used to talking to a woman he finds attractive.

A long time ago, I would have considered teasing the kid to compensate with the buzz of annoyance I felt at having a person who was in an official capacity under my protection as the guardian of Patch willingly throwing himself into danger by hunting alone in _possibly_ Grimm infested woods, but I shove it all down and lean against my front door.

“You don’t think so?” I echo, eyebrow raised.

The teen takes a moment to gather his thoughts before offering me a shrug that answers precisely nothing. I get it though, for a long time, until the Fall of Beacon, a lot of everyday citizens simply hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the Grimm, the monsters a known reality, but the walls and gates of the few standing civilizations across Remnant keeping their stark reality a distant worry.

There had even been parts of more affluent nations that had started to theorize that Grimm weren’t even real, a fabrication of a government’s will to control. I’d say they had eggs on their face when everything crumbled to shit but… honestly? These days I’d give just about anything to go back to _that_ level of ignorance.

“Alright, start from the beginning, what were you doing?” I ask flatly, this kid obviously had something he felt was important enough to be out in the darkness of Patch to find me.

“Okay, well this afternoon I was out hunting. Since your last clearance patrol there hasn’t been anybody in town or at any of the other farms that has seen a Grimm and because of last year’s rainy summer, our stores aren’t as solid as they could have been, so I’ve been contributing by going after whatever I could find,” _that_ explained the lack of self-preservation instincts in the kid, winter was tough all over for a lot of people, farmers especially, “so anyways, late morning I catch wind of a doe near the springs and start tracking it north east, thing was jumpy, cautious. With its size it prolly had to contend with avoiding Grimm so she was observant, finally got a bead on her around a kilometer from the cliff face, didn’t even notice there was something else there until I took the shot…”

Well _that’s_ an ominous way to state that.

“Going to need you to define ‘ **something else** ’” I state flatly.

“That’s just it, I dunno what or who it was,” The teen’s voice raises in pitch, equal parts confusion and fear as his eyes finally trail back up to meet mine, “I aimed for the base of the neck, and just as I squeezed this thing came bounding out of the treeline right quick, low to the ground, covered in furs or maybe pelts and… the goddamn bullet hit true, dropped the doe low in one shot, but it passed right through and hit whoever, _whatever_ that thing in the woods was”

“Alright, going to need you to breathe,” My voice is calm now, sympathetic. I don’t have to reach far to find sympathy, if this kid killed someone it was going to affect him for a long time, I know that feeling, “so whoever or whatever, which is it? Did you kill them?”

“N-NO!” The teen declares, again the crackle of a voice caught between two octaves appears and I have to restrain a wince as it basically assaults my ears, “I didn’t kill whatever it was, but it caught it’s arm. The sound the thing made wasn’t… _human_ , but I don’t think it was a Grimm. It _looked_ at me, yellow or golden eyes... then bolted, clutching it’s arm and limping it ran away from me even as I called out to whoever it was…”

The information is concerning to say the least. I unfortunately come equipped with a startlingly vast knowledge of bandits and bandit behavior and even I have to say this is a new one to me. There isn’t a single bandit tribe I’ve ever heard of that had taken to wearing the pelts of wild animals, all of them preferring to either buy or steal the means to make their own clothes, if not outright pilfer clothes themselves from whatever settlements they attacked.

The kid is right though, it didn’t sound like a Grimm, either. Salem was a lot of things, most of which couldn’t be said in polite company, but the designs of her creatures, the instruments of her war were nothing if not coordinated, beings of black, blood red, bone white and _nothing else._

“Did you go after it?” The question slips out before I can think to rephrase it, police my own curiosity instead of holding contempt for the idea of a near-Aura-less person willingly chasing off a being of unknown origin alone.

I need to know, though.

“I _tried,_ ” He breathes, head turning down with an air of unearned shame, “snowshoes on and it didn’t count for jack squat, whatever it was basically glided through the snow, even with a visible limp. I tried to track the few splatters of blood in its wake, but at some point it somehow scaled the trees and then… _Brothers_ , it was like trying to track a drop of water upstream. By the time night fell I’d lost track of it entirely… so I grabbed the doe, dropped it home for ma to clean, then came here to report it”

I feel the hiss escape through my clenched teeth before I’m really aware of it, this kid was seemingly _begging_ a Grimm or a bandit tribe or a… mysterious beast of unknown origin, apparently, to drag him into the wilds never to be seen again. Couldn’t his goddamn parents have at least sent a sibling or two with him? He had four last I recalled.

“Alright,” I sigh, the booze sloshing around in my stomach makes coming up with a plan of action a little bit sluggish, but I’m not too worried, planning and strategy were more my sister’s thing, “so tomorrow at first light, you’re going to lead me out and show me where you took the shot. Then we’re going to track along the coast all nice and quiet like until I decide whether or not a bandit tribe has taken roost on Patch, if the answer is yes I’m levelling their camp and arresting everybody while you hunker down nice and small and try to look like you’re not a target…”

I’m only partially pleased with the fact that he nods without pause.

“... and if it’s not a bandit?”

Ah right, “Then I’m going to try and locate whoever or whatever it was on my own. No offense, if it’s a person they might not be all that receptive to seeing the dude that clipped them,” Okay, I’ll admit I feel a little bad when I see his shoulders drop, “oh, and there isn’t a fuckin’ _chance_ I’m letting you walk back to your family’s farm alone, think your father would mind me crashing on the couch so we can start bright and early tomorrow or am I going to have to walk back here for the night?”

“Y-you don’t have to...” 

“No I really don’t but I’m going to” I fire back quickly as I make a quick venture through my house, leaving the teen by the door as I quickly snap up my wallet and house keys, stuffing them in the pockets of my cargo pants I fish out the forgotten temporary prosthetic I’d been sent while my combat ready one was being serviced and repaired in Mantle. It was a far more realistic model but still possessed that strange uncanny valley appearance that was disarming to the eye, hence why I rarely put it on.

It was more of a day-to-day prosthetic, responsive and built to give the sensation of genuine feeling through my neural network, it was also far hardier than it looked, able to handle an impressive amount of weight and tension, but not nearly to the extent of my old arm, which had been built with the rigors of a huntress' life in mind. I quickly snap the prosthetic into it's fixture and give it a twist, locking it in place and feeling the fingers twitch and move as naturally as if my original, flesh-and-blood limb was still there.

I venture through to the front entrance, mildly pleased to see the kid stuffing his beanie back on and preparing to venture back out into the cold. Opening the closet by the door I grab out my thick fur-lined coat and pocket two sets of fingered gloves before snagging my pre-packed overnight back and shrugging it over my shoulders.

With the familiar weight of my pack on my back I close the closet and venture over to the shoes before shrugging on a well-worn pair of tan leather workboots, the fur lining of them having been stitched in by me personally to assist in retaining heat in the winter.

“You ready to go?” I ask once I’m ready myself, earning a nod, “Good, follow me, keep an eye out for anything strange, and hide if anything attacks, got it?”

“Uh, yeah”

“Good,” I offer him a smile that I hope appears far more genuine than it feels as I open the door and wave for him to step outside, “then let’s get going”

I follow the young man out, immediately feeling my lungs tighten as the cool winter climes bite right through for a moment. I take my time locking the door, letting my body take a few precious seconds to acclimate. Physically, my body ran hot, so much so that Ruby, Weiss and… well, my team had often jokingly referred to me as a walking, talking furnace.

Once I got moving, winter simply wouldn’t bother me.

I had plenty of things to torment me already, the cold just didn’t matter. As we set off to the kid’s farm, I reflect momentarily on my night so far.

The cold, the Grimm, the war, Salem.

  
I was surviving them all, but… _when would I get to live?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is an amalgamation of two separate story ideas I had joining together. The Blake half of the equation is obviously very, very simple, the Yang side though hinges on something a lot more nebulous regarding the character's development within the canon. Yang didn't truly come into her own until she reconciled both her abandonment issues with Raven, and her abandonment issues with Blake.
> 
> What if she never had that reunion, those chances to grow alongside Blake, the chance to face down Adam together? What if the partner she had didn't just run away, but actively betrayed her instead?
> 
> Well, besides all that other shit there's going to be a loosely flowing continuity between canon and my bullshit, altered and snipped to fit the needs of the story I want to write, which also includes addressing the White Fang and it's descent into extremism, as well as showing exactly who could manipulate things behind the scenes.
> 
> As always, kudos, comments and constructive criticism is appreciated and encouraged!


	3. Wither Fear and Survival Led

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hunger, fear and infection are feeding into the ever-looming specter of death in her mind.
> 
> So why do the memories feel worse?

_She remembers the smell of diesel, the sickly tang of outdated fossil fuels, a relic of an initiative to remove the need for dust several decades prior that had failed spectacularly against strong legal legislation pushed forward by the various paid-for politicians and their holdovers by the SDC, as well as the simple, honest indifference of the public at large, balking at the extravagant cost projections of switching from their established conglomerate of power, rendered the innovations a moot point._

_Trucks like the one she has been sitting in were somewhere between a curiosity to be bandied about by collectors, and a museum piece to be snarked at for it’s impracticality against Remnant’s ‘ **s**_ ** _uperior_ ** _’, Dust-lead future._

_This particular vehicle though, was being operated more out of a singular, focused vitriol against giving the Schnee Dust Company any more Faunus-earned Lien._

_She would have been almost impressed with that level of spite, if the stench of burning crude oil didn’t make her want to projectile vomit across the interior._

_The presence of other like-minded Faunus helps to ebb the tide of nausea and dull the light throbbing in her temples. There were a dozen of them, all clad in crisp black and white, fresh-pressed and recently unsealed. The uniform looked impressive upon first wear, but had yet to soften and conform to the bodies of the individual wearer, her own chaffed harshly at the shoulders and knees, ensuring that by the time she was granted permission to bed down for the night and remove the garments, she’d undoubtedly be sporting some hefty friction marks._

_They’d been assured before rolling out to indoc that the starchy, itchy feeling would subside, but much like everything that had been promised, it would only come with hard work. The stiff seams would fade, the chaffing would stop, the material would adopt a more malleable and forming nature to the individual, they just had to_ **_work_ ** _for it, and eventually enough laundered washes and ounces of sweat would have everyone - herself included - existing within those provided threads like a second skin._

_The thought was fancy, but as the deer faunus to her left kept reminding her every time she grumbled, being comfortable in a second skin later did not account for the discomfort of their actual skin_ **_now._ **

_They seemed to be getting a head start on sweating at least, the densely packed foliage of southern Mistral was rich and teeming with wildlife, aided by a humid, sweltering atmosphere that combined the freshwater lakes further into the continent against the saltwater breeze that came in off the channel separating Mistral from the island of Menagerie._

_So close to home for herself and many like her, but far enough away that they could indelibly separate themselves from the lax,_ **_complacent_ ** _masses they’d left behind, be they friends, lovers, or family._

_She remembers their faces, eyes swimming with perceived disappointment and condescension, shaking and dismissing her wants. Bearing the brunt of her anger, of her outraged insults and accusations. They didn’t raise their voices, they didn’t chide her, and it felt all the worse. It felt dismissive._

_It felt like she hadn’t even had a point._

_She can feel that ball of frustration in her chest then, the familiarity of how unfair and angering it had been. It hadn’t just gone away when she’d stormed to her room and slammed the door shut amidst barbed words she hoped had hurt them. It had dulled over the days since, to be sure. The pain loses its sharp edges to become something smooth and manageable, dull and muted._

_It had felt even more manageable with the accompanying vindication and spite that had broiled within her when she’d managed to sneak out of the house, and down to a recruitment center that her parents were no longer privy to know the location of. It had taken her a few hours of searching, but there had been little in the way of paperwork, and nobody bothered to verify her age, or her parental or guardian permission._

_Bureaucracy hadn’t worked when they were a Civil Rights group, why would it work now that they were freedom fighters?_

_This was a new dawn for the organization itself, after all._

_She wasn’t going to give up the fight, not like her parents. She simply couldn’t, and if they were mad about it when they discovered her room empty and the barbed, scathing goodbye note left in her wake, then they could wallow in it._

_They had raised her this way after all._

_It wasn’t her fault they’d lost their taste for their own cause when more drastic steps needed to be taken, she had said as much right to their faces. Who were they to try and forbid her from the cause she was quite literally_ **_born_ ** _into? It hadn’t mattered when they filled her head with all the injustices met upon their kind._

_It hadn’t mattered when they were witnessing her on their television sets as a child, holding high a picket sign with a message she barely understood at her age._

_It hadn’t mattered during all those times when she cowered with them in the corner of whatever flea-bitten hotel or motel deigned to rent a room out to ‘their kind’. Whatever inbred anti-faunus scumbag of the week had shot at their rental car or thrown a brick through their window while they travelled from rally-to-rally, event-to-event._

_They still pressed ever onward, all the time assuring her that they were doing the right thing, that facing the danger they were placed in every day was worth it because the Faunus weren’t animals, and didn’t deserve to be treated as such._

_It was still worth fighting for now, even if her parents no longer thought so._

_She doesn’t recall how long she spent in the back of the transport, alternating between excitement and nauseous anxiety. That morning’s piecemeal breakfast after she and her fellow recruits got off the boat sloshing angrily in her stress-constricted stomach while the vehicle itself bounced and lurched down dirt and gravel roads, the driver seemingly trying to tag every pothole and bump the route offered._

_What she does remember, with a moment of startling clarity, is when they’d reached their destination. The squeal of old breaks causing every passenger including herself to almost fall over, and while some took the time to either grumble at the rough treatment or cheer that they’d finally arrived at their destination, she herself instead strained to hear what could be gleaned from the surroundings outside of her physical view._

_The heavy green tarp helped muffle the specifics of the conversation between the driver and the sentry of their location, and what she did manage to pick up was rote, dull and unimportant, at least to her untrained mind at that point. What did catch her interest was the sounds of makeshift civilization in the distance, the pounding of feet, the din of shouting voices and rapport, the faint smells of fire and cooking._

**_They had finally arrived_ ** _._

_After a few moments longer the truck moved again and those sounds, as dim as they were, grew in volume the closer they got. She casts a look around the transport, watching as her fellow recruits shifted between the same excitement and anxiety as she was._

_She recalls the sun being borderline blinding when the tailgate was dropped and the tarp was pulled back. The small swell of pride that helped to choke out the reticence of that tiny voice of caution at the back of her mind as those already situated in the training camp began to cheer and applaud the arrival of fresh blood to the cause._

_They’re made to stand in a line while a fox Faunus with a clipboard makes his way between them, asking for names and any form of civilian identification they had on them before telling each individual their new identification number, and stressing that they need to commit it to memory._

_A voice cut through the din, giving the fox Faunus pause right before he reached her, the voice was male, authoritative and powerful. Her eyes had been drawn to it to rest on a bull Faunus as he made his way to the new batch. Unlike the uniform white-and-black of those around him, this member of the movement was clad in the telltale black of an upper crust member._

_One of Sienna Khan’s chosen._

_She recalls how she_ **_knew_ ** _, even with the ornamental Grimm mask that shielded his face from view, his eyes were on her. How her instincts screamed at her to run. How her blood became something ice-filled and viscous, and then later, how her pride and self-delusion would tell her that those weren’t warning signs, but rather the strength of his charisma._

_The powerful bull Faunus stands well over her, tall, lithe and strong as he reinforces the point he’d just made a second time, which is fortunate because in her own shock she’d totally misheard him the first time._

_“As newbies, every time you are addressed you will not only give your name, but your identification number until it is drilled into your psyche. Until your time here is complete, that identification number is the ONLY bit of individuality you will be afforded until we find out your strengths and weaknesses, until we decide where every single one of you would best fit, to do your best for the cause…”_

_She remembers staring into the dark slots of the Grimm mask, pinned by an intensity she just somehow_ **_knew_ ** _lay behind it._

_“... this is the new front for a brave new day, where we_ **_will_ ** _make our voices heard. I understand many of us were a part of what it used to mean to be part of the White Fang, to march and cry out, I - like you - have seen the improvements that brought with it, but we’ve reached the end of the road in regards to how far peaceful protest will bring us, what good are our words if nobody is willing to_ **_listen_ ** _? Today, I swear to all of you that the next hard step will be just that, we_ **_will_ ** _be heard, humanity_ **_will_ ** _listen, and we will not give them a single, solitary chance to refute us!”_

_She’s struck, even in memory, by the wave of adulation and manic fervor in the rising cheers and applause of her new comrades. Yet even with that outpouring of raw support,_ **_he doesn’t waver_ ** _, doesn’t smile, doesn’t give any indication of basking in his impassioned speech, like he’s above it, too good for it. Like his words are just indelible fact._

_His gaze never leaves hers._

_“_ **_My name is-”_ **

She’s awoken by the pain lancing through her arm, having rolled onto it during her sleep, she wheeled the opposite way with a pained hiss, white flashing in her eyes as the sudden motion sets her head to spinning and her stomach to rolling.

She manages to get her good arm under her and pushes up to her knees while she dry heaves on the floor of her cave, the emptiness of her stomach giving her only a dry hacking pain in her chest while her nausea attempts to expel something, _anything_ from her mouth, but nothing ever comes out save for garbled consonants and huffs of anguish.

It has been two days since she’s last eaten, and five since she’d been clipped by that hunter. Any attempts at a marrow-based stew or soup were so watered down and thin that there was simply no caloric intake to be derived from them, and her flagging aura was almost entirely pushed to either trying to keep her knee from falling apart, or fending off infection from her newest wound, the hydrogen peroxide having been tipped over and drained three days prior.

It was a stop gap measure she hadn’t wanted to take, using her valuable aura to fend off sickness, but she no longer had a choice. She needed food, she needed to recharge her aura, she needed to heal, and to do any of that, the first thing she needed to do was survive.

It was something that she’d learned a long time ago, as long as she was still breathing, still had the ability to move, she could survive, she just needed to ensure that she would stay alive first.

As the wet, hacking coughs subside though, she finds herself disturbed to find her own tongue feels thick and heavy, almost like it’s a chore to truly breathe around, she spits then, hoping that maybe the clearing of phlegm and stomach-acid tinged saliva will fix everything, yet even then her own appendage feels far too constrictive within her own head. She places her second arm under her, ignoring the sharp throb of pain from her wound to push herself to her feet.

Her world shifts, vertigo hitting her and she pitches sideways, feet tangling in her sleeping furs but just lucky enough to catch the wall of the cave and stabilize herself.

The wounded arm feels hot, and almost like it’s too big for her own skin to contain. It takes a moment for her eyes to focus, a couple seconds longer for her foggy brain to catch up, but she turns her attention to the arm in question, with one shaky hand she unravels the dirty bandage covering the wound and upon first viewing it finds herself hissing in anger. 

Sometime in the middle of the night, her aura had failed, the wound is an angry red, same as a large area of the skin around it, promising a severe infection. Her breathing starts to quicken as panic takes over as her mind runs through her options.

Hunting or even checking her traps had become next to impossible since her encounter with the young man that had shot her, as there was now someone - or _several_ someones - that routinely ventured through that area. Unlike the man that had put a bullet through her arm, whoever these people were had no interest in game trapping, they were **_looking for her_ **.

It was telling in the makeshift trails she had found on her rare ventures outside of the cave, the footprints cutting through the snow, oftentimes finding them loitering around the old animal and hunting trails that she herself had stuck to in her pursuit of food. The one time she’d managed to make it to a handful of her own game traps she’d been nearly apoplectic to find that the scent of humanity pervaded the area so thoroughly that there wasn’t a single solitary chance a hare or anything would come near the area and be ensnared.

Those rare times she’d made it out had become even more difficult with the realization that her aura simply couldn’t support fending off both infection as well as keeping her knee together, as such it had become a matter of rationing her soul’s power, and banking on the increasingly improbable possibility that maybe, _just maybe_ , she’d come across something to eat, to stave off the near starvation that had her stomach aching throughout her waking hours.

She concentrates then, hoping to maybe push enough aura out to at least isolate the infection, she’d just have to live with the fact that she was operating on one leg for the moment, but if the infection reached her blood stream - if it hadn’t already - then she was properly fucked.

It takes several minutes to bring to bear anything, the flickering of her own soul’s power in her mind so distant it almost feels illusory. As though trying to remember something - a name, a place, anything - but the words for it lay on the tip of your mind and tongue. It’s a frustrating struggle, trying to grasp her own aura, and she’s vaguely aware of her own voice stuck in a low growl as it slips and eludes her grasp for several minutes.

She’s reminded of her dream in that moment, of the struggle she’d had to grasp something as nebulous as the concept of her own soul and the power within that had likewise evaded her shortly after her arrival in the new White Fang.

The thoughts cause anger and discomfort, and she wishes for nothing more than to tear them out of her mind before they take root, but it’s already too late, and thoughts and memories that had remained vague in her subconscious for a long time are suddenly dragged to the forefront of her recollection even as she continues to try and struggle with her aura.

When was the last time she’d had a dream?

When was the last time she’d remembered the beginning of her own end?

Fear was a great motivator, it had kept her safe, it had gotten her to run and had turned her into what she was in this very moment. A survivor. Fear was the single greatest asset that she had ever been blessed with and it had come to her aid time and time again, it had informed her of the gut feelings and reactions that had helped her avoid countless bad situations, it had driven her from making the mistake of trusting people that truly intended to hurt her, every close call, every brush with death, every personal tragedy avoided was all owed to that simple word, and the hefty consequences behind it’s meaning.

Fear _is_ survival.

Like everything in life though, there was no such thing as a gift without cost, and in the world of Remnant there was one simple truth about relying on ‘ **negative** ’ emotions. 

**_Fear brought the Grimm._ **

She vaguely recalls her first months out in the wilds of Mistral, constantly finding time she simply didn’t have to meditate, to quell and drive back any and all emotions in between dodging White Fang patrols, bandit camps and even the occasional Atlas Scouting party. All to keep the nearest pack of beowolves or ursa’s from drawing ever closer to whatever temporary shelter she’d managed to hide away in.

The thing about fear though, was it’s many evolutionary stages, and she’d discovered several of them, as well as bore witness to others, even before her bid for mere survival.

While fear could cripple, and had done just so to millions before her, it could also galvanize, morph, twist and solidify into something sustainable, something positive. Fear could be something beautiful in it’s usefulness, provided an individual pushed past all the negativity and were willing to sacrifice a few things along the way.

Her own fear had twisted into perseverance at all costs, the price had been hefty, crippling almost, but as the ages passed her by, she found that she was still here and those costs would be paid again gladly.

Her empathy was traded for apathy, her charity given freely to make room for pragmatism, her mercy sacrificed for aggression, and her dreams and nightmares were sacrificed to _tomorrow_.

Months of battling the elements, other people and the Grimm that her own fear had summoned like a signal fire had kept her busy, had concealed and obfuscated the moment that the evolution of her own fear had made, but slowly she’d started to realize that she no longer could recall what lay behind her in her past, the specters and memories that had set her to flight to begin with.

Which wasn’t to say that she’d forgotten them, just that her mind seemed to know that to dwell on them would mean death, if not by the Remnant-cursed demons that stalked the world, then maybe by her very own hand.

_So why could she recall them now?_

It’s a distressing thought, aided in power by the ever-growing frustration of trying to bring the power of her soul to the forefront. She feels the echoes of anxiety tingling in her chest, but before it can blossom into something more concerning, she feels the power called forward and has to restrain a cry of success, as though acknowledging this minor victory would be to sabotage it.

She quickly channels the mild - alarmingly mild - power into her arm and feels the pressure of infection and inflammation around her wound quell down to a manageable level.

She doesn’t have long until the reserve runs out though, and she knows it, she needs food _now_ , and that means that regardless of how bad her knee is, or how many people were out looking for the mysterious Faunus who’d been shot by one of the local yokels, she needed to venture out, to hunt and _succeed._

**To survive.**

Using the goal to orient herself, she finds the thoughts and recollections of a life that’s no longer hers dissipate as she quickly dresses herself, wrapping slim cuts of fur around calloused feet, pulling tight the torn remnants of the last pair of manufactured pants she’d managed to steal many seasons before, and sliding several layers over her head, poncho-style, before tying the center tight with a length of cloth she simply couldn’t remember obtaining.

Arms still free and unencumbered, she grabs her _friend_ and laces it to her right forearm, using the excess fishing line to twine carefully around her wrist. With the blade secured, she shuffles into a makeshift cloak primarily composed of bear-skin, with several holes in it that had been patched over by the pelts of several unfortunate rabbits that litter the island during the spring season.

Certain she’s ready, she casts a few more pieces of wood into the waning fire in the center of the cave before casting out, grimace on her face at the protestations of her knee.

Despite her newly won focus, and the knowledge that she needs this hunt to be a success to see tomorrow, she still finds her concentration slipping, becoming almost unaware of the passage of time and distance as she makes her way out of the cave, she doesn’t remember sidling around the cliff face on the northern part of the island, and the only thing she vaguely recalls about making her way down to the ground from it’s elevated position is the pain shooting up her leg when she fails to cushion her landing well enough.

She’s making her way back to the familiar hunting ground she’s grown so accustomed to, hoping that maybe - this time - there’s something in one of the falls or snares that she can abscond with, but she’s not really _looking_ at what lies on the fringes, her body on autopilot, her focus broken. She’s lost in desperation, hunger and survival being the only aspects of her situation that she’s truly lost within.

Normally she’s better than this.

_Normally, even in this mindset, she was still aware enough to hear and smell the dangers around her._

**_Normally, she wasn’t starving to death and mere hours from sickness claiming her life,_ **

She wasn’t in a normal situation though, and as such she almost forgives herself when she pushes through a brush and walks directly into the line of sight of another person.

“Oh **_fuck_ ** _”_

She jumps slightly, but when she lands she’s not moving like she normally would be, instead her tongue feels heavy and her breathing restricted, her arm and knee ache in equal measures and she finds herself right back to being locked under the gaze of something she perceived as being infinitely more powerful than she.

There’s about ten meters of distance between her and the human who was downwind of her. The human was female, which was easy to tell without the scent, by virtue of the curves beneath the winter layers the mysterious woman wore.

She wasn’t pinned by the extraneous details then though, wasn’t made to feel like prey by the vivacious blonde locks that jutted out from beneath the light orange beanie cap on her head, or the glint of a yellow bracelet over her left wrist. She wasn’t struck by the powerful frame that _visibly_ lurked beneath the winter layers, or even the unusual height the woman was blessed with.

It was the flash of shocked lilac that regarded her.

A moment passes and she can almost read the indecision in those eyes, clouded by… something else? The dilation of the pupils and the very, _very_ slight sluggishness as the blonde woman takes in details of her own speak to something familiar, but that she can’t grasp in that moment.

“Uh, hello. I think you’re the one I’ve been looking for,” The blonde starts cautiously, there’s a slight slurring on her consonants that isn’t tied in with some sort of dialect or accent and she finds her eyes narrowing, the spell of those lilac eyes eroding as her body starts to loosen up, to be controlled by her again, “... farmboy clipped you a few days ago, right?”

Regardless of her body coming under her own control again, she still feels the compulsion to nod in response, but refrains, she doesn’t need this woman before her to know that she understood her. Her body screams against her instincts and she’s suddenly keenly aware that she has no more aura to give, the infection was free to swim loose in her arm once again and she was out of time.

The blonde takes a step forward and attempts another, her hands up and outward placatingly, but her steps freeze when she looks down at her feet, letting her know that she noticed the motion.

She feels her hand twitch, itching to reach for her weapons, _her friend_ , to ward this mysterious blonde off and make her way over to the snares and other traps she’d set and hope against hope there was something to quell her hunger there.

Despite the adrenaline coursing through her veins and the fear clouding her mind, she can’t help but figure it’s a bad idea, this blonde woman wasn’t just powerful in the sense of her frame, she carried herself with the calm assurance of a trained monster, and given that she was out here in the woods alone means that she was comfortable enough with the prospect of facing off against Grimm and the like alone.

All so she could look for _her?_

“Look, the kid feels awful. I can take you to a doc-HEY!”

She’s off and running, ignoring the scream of her knee, the throb of her arm, and the exhaustion in her body, all she needs to focus on right now is adrenaline and survival. The blonde wanted to _take her_ somewhere, a doctor, a friend, a _better place_? Whatever it was, she had no interest, she had long ago learned to turn away from any act of charity, lest she end up in either servitude or a shallow grave.

Much like the last human that had chased her, the blonde had issues navigating the deep snow, but her physical attributes definitely leant itself to a closer pursuit than she was comfortable with.

With the wound and the knee, she could feel her heart hammering in her ears, adrenaline-infused blood pulsing so hard it sounded like a staccato rhythm in her ears.

She doesn’t look back as she struggles up a tree, nor does she double back or loop around, she can’t afford to waste the time with a much more dangerous predator on her trail.

She needed to get back to the cave.

Despite the hunger, despite the sickness, she needed sanctuary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stated how I wanted to explore the White Fang, indoctrination and recruitment, and this is the start of that. Let me just say, there's a lot of branching paths to this particular exploration and I'm looking forward to getting to them.
> 
> Up next, another Yang chapter!
> 
> As always, please offer comments and constructive criticism, it's always motivating and appreciated.


	4. Perdition on This Side of the Mortal Coil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whether it's ghosts or a mysterious, amber-eyed woman, Yang will chase them... or at least the memories they leave behind.

If my father were still alive, I know for a  _ fact _ he’d be torn between laughing his ass off at the fact that his sporty daughter was currently struggling to quickly navigate her way through the labyrinthian maze of tall trees of Patch while fighting through the rolling snowbanks and ice patches in pursuit of a very  _ visibly _ emaciated and hobbled woman - and  _ losing ground, goddammit _ \- or he’d be half way through a sermon on responsibility and excess over the fact that my huffing, hungover ass was basically sweating pure grain alcohol while struggling to even keep up with said woman.

I bet that sermon would sound very similar to any of the ones he used to lay on Uncle Qrow back in the day. Even in memory, there’s a rather alarmingly large part of me that feels some level of envy over Qrow’s ability to shrug Taiyang’s disappointment and admonishment off like it was so much water off of his back.

Even with the stench of mid-grade whisky on my breath and the pounding of my heartbeat ringing off my hangover-suffering skull, all I manage to feel from the very  _ thought _ of dad’s purely hypothetical words are  _ shame. _

I still see the dark blur of my… well, I guess  _ target _ is the term that will have to do, even though at this point I have no cause to want to visit harm or any ill-will upon her. To be honest if I’d found a lone  _ person  _ \- be they a poacher or bandit - in perfect health, I’d have been content to give them a small reading of the riot act, then told them to either make their way to the town properly, or to get off the island entirely if they seemed intent on making trouble.

The woman - all jerky movements and limping desperation - moves with a practised urgency I can’t help but find impressive, she moves like the snow has never mattered to her while the same white powder packs in around each and every step I take, weighing me down and slowing my chase. 

I’m visibly in better shape than the woman, taller, stronger, and better fed. When she’d turned and bolted my reaction time was slowed by equal parts surprise and alcohol, followed by mild amusement as I assumed all those factors I had over said woman would  _ obviously _ account for her head start.

That assumption bit me in the ass  **almost instantly** as I watched the distance said woman cleared in such a short amount of time.

Ten minutes had passed and both my thighs and lungs burned in equal measure of strain, the slight tang of bile rising to my lips, threatening to expel this morning’s food-pyramid approved breakfast burrito with every lurch of my stomach as I worked my level-best to keep the furs-clad stranger in sight. 

I break through a row of winter-bare birch trees only to find a sharp decline hidden from view behind them, my feet leaving me I quickly transfer my momentum into a slide, white powder kicking up to sting against my cheeks and obscure my vision only to reach the six foot incline that led to the other side of the natural trench, I scrabble on hands and knees back to level ground and pause a moment.

_ Where did she go? _

Along my left side was the sheer cliffs and rock faces that indicated the quite-literal edge of the north side of the island, the path behind me was the area I had been scouring for the past five days, looking for any signs of bandit camps or makeshift domicile, so I’m pretty confident that whoever that woman is, she has no interest in looping back that way save to check any of her traps and snares.

I’d bet good Lien that bumping into me put an ax into that plan for the day, and from the appearance of the sharp, gaunt cheeks that held that woman’s dilated amber eyes, that was definitely a bad thing. 

I feel the growl of frustration in my throat, I  _ should _ have reacted quicker, been able to catch her, not be here,  _ now,  _ standing around like a fool and wondering what my next step was. It had taken me five days just to catch a glimpse of her, and I didn’t just get lucky enough to catch a good look, I was able to speak to her, a few more feet and I could have reached out and touched her, instead I just watched as she put distance between the two of us for a couple of seconds and then subsequently got outran in the woods of my  _ near-literal _ own backyard.

I was supposed to be better than this, wasn’t I?

Maybe it was rust, maybe it was complacency from the long months that had settled in since the last Grimm attack on the island. That I’d let the blade of my training and experience dull with alcohol, self-pity and booze.

It would explain exactly why that first night, when I’d crashed at farmboy’s family house, I’d been too drunk to remember the gauntlet for my left arm, my literal  _ only  _ weapon outside of my martial arts training while my combat arm was still out for repairs. 

That first day, having the young lad lead me through the trees I’d quietly cussed myself out, torn between my ego and embarrassment as I wondered what exactly I’d do if me and the farmboy  _ did _ come under attack right then, if I’d be good enough with a civilian model prosthetic and my flesh-and-blood weaker hand to protect myself and my charge as he showed me exactly where he’d lost the trail of the thing - the  _ woman _ I was now in pursuit of - and finding that I simply didn’t know if I was good enough to do so.

The old Yang Xiao Long wouldn’t have been stupid enough to forget her weapon.

The old Yang Xiao Long wouldn’t have even questioned her ability to defend herself and someone under her protection.

The old Yang Xiao Long was someone I loathed and missed in equal measure.

I recall farmboy gesturing wildly up to the trees, frustrated that the trail seemingly ended there after he’d been led in circles the day prior, but he also seemed strangely pleased that there was still visible proof that he hadn’t been lying, that  _ someone _ or  _ something _ had been out there.

Needless to say, I’d been convinced. I was also really bored with having nothing better to do, so with a starting point and a goal in mind, I decided to investigate further… on my own. Farmboy didn’t like it, but I ordered him home, at least if I fucked up it would only cost me from that point forward.

I think that normally I would have given up after the third day of combing through the woods alone - thankfully armed with my remaining gauntlet after that first day’s lapse in judgement - but I just. I needed something to fill my time, I’d been too far in my own head back at the house and even the appealing numbness of liquor was starting to lose its effectiveness when my mind decided to go to war with itself in the dark hours, sitting in front of the fireplace and reminiscing about better days.

Even if I found nothing. No trace of bandits. No hovel where some strange, unknowable hermit resided. I appreciated having an excuse to keep myself busy. If anyone asked I could tell them that I at least knew something  _ had _ been out in the dense forest of Patch, that if I found nothing to solidify that knowledge whatsoever I could just say,  _ y’know, _ they’d moved on after one of the locals accidentally shot them.

By the time I had gotten up this morning, just before the sun dawned over the horizon, I realized that at this point I expected nothing from this search than to fill in the time until some other,  _ better _ distraction came along to occupy my time.

That certainly explains why I nearly jumped out of my own skin the moment  _ she _ burst forth from between some pine trees, mere feet from me.

Luckily she seemed just as shocked by my appearance as I did hers, because it allowed my mind to really get a grasp on who I was looking at, I hadn’t indulged in too much hair of the dog this morning - a small finger or two in my morning coffee before heading out - but my perception still needed those additional few seconds of stunned silence to catch up. To register that the five-and-a-half-foot tall humanoid shape in front of me wasn’t some sort of new, unspeakable creature, covered as she was in all those pelts.

The eyes are what I locked into first, the amber color giving them a piercing quality that seemed to stare right through me, even as the pupils dilated in obvious fear. Her skin dirty and soot-smeared, telling of a night huddled in close to a fire and without means to routinely bathe. The protrusion of bone from a face I suspect is already angular tells of malnutrition.

My eyes had drifted to her hands next, to catch them clenching and unclenching, a sure sign she was torn between her flight-or-fight response, debating if it was worth it to attack me. They’re much smaller than mine, but even through the dirt and the raw-red chaff of cold winter air I can see the crossing zigs and zags of innumerable scars, littering the flesh across knuckles.

This woman I was chasing, whoever she was, was no stranger to fighting or struggle, but  _ Brothers _ on high was it obvious that she was far from alright. Whether it was due to the harsh rigors of the season itself, flagrant injury that was obvious even to the untrained eye, unrestrained fear of being discovered or - most likely - a combination of all three, this unknown woman was in a bad,  _ bad _ way.

I’ve seen a lot in my years on Remnant, living through terroristic threats, abominable otherworldly creations and a stand-up  **_war_ ** for the face of human-and-faunus-kind alike. Things that had stuck with me, that I still had trouble bringing up even to the people that had bore witness to them right alongside me.

Few things in this life disturbed me quite as much as seeing someone not get the help they needed out of fear.

It’s why I still get the urge to fly up to Atlas and kick over James Ironwood’s headstone for what his actions had done to Mantle.

It’s why I flagrantly went against Ozpin’s wishes at war’s end and told Lisa Lavender in a stand-up issue about why Leonardo Lionheart deserved  _ nothing _ in remembrance for the countless lives he sacrificed for his own.

It’s why I’m currently a half-hours walk south from my home, on the north side of the island of Patch, sucking wind and searching for someone who obviously doesn’t want to be found, because fear can make victims of anyone.

It had clearly made a victim of this amber-eyed woman, and my gut was telling me that if I didn’t find her today, fear was going to kill her.

So  _ where in the fuck _ was she?

North was the sea, west would have led her back to me, south would have led home - which I had to believe  _ she _ would know, having spent long enough on the island to have travelled hunting routes - and all that left was east. 

East, up over the ridgeline and gradual slope up to the highest point on the island.

**_I’m more than familiar with what’s up there._ **

The northeast part of Patch was uninhabitable, and as such, remained so, the tough and rocky terrain of the cliff face stretched farther inland and the rocky crags and seaward facing direction meant that it simply wasn’t an option for farming  _ and _ it bore the hardest brunt of the seasonal summer storms that rolled through a few times every year. As wild a place as Patch was, purposely left as natural and unmolested by the ravages of intelligent society as it were, the northeast part of the island was raw.

In fact, there was only one path out that way.

I know this, because my family was the one that had carved it, marked it, and travelled it, time and time again, for  _ decades. _

Someday soon, I’d make my final trip down that trail, to be laid down beside Summer and Taiyang.

**_Thus Kindly, I scatter..._ **

I can feel a pang of distress well up in my chest as the realization sets in. She’s up there somewhere with the… with them, my family. The headstones for my father and - by all accounts - my true mother, standing as silent cenotaphs, immovable, stalwart guardians for the people of Patch even in death.

Surprisingly, I don’t feel disgust or rage at the fact that this amber-eyed girl is up there, keeping company with the ghosts of my family. I highly doubt she’s all that knowledgeable as to where she is concerning and let’s be honest, if you were looking for a low-traffic area to keep your head down and stay out of view, you could do a lot worse than where the dead lay buried.

Rather, what I feel now is anxiety and shame.

It has been about two years since I had last made an appearance there to talk with them, shortly after Zwei had finally passed from old age. Ruby and Weiss had come with me, both equally as distraught and inconsolable over that last tie to our lives that wasn’t merely our own.

Ever since then, whenever Ruby had the opportunity to make it home, she’d made the venture alone, while I constantly found excuses to give about why I couldn’t go, or that I had just gone shortly before she’d arrived and I was too emotionally drained to make a return trip so soon.

The truth is, I just don’t want my mom or dad to see me like this… this  _ person _ that I’ve become. 

Maybe I could wait another day and see if I could catch the amber-eyed girl out in the open another day?

Guilt twists and churns my stomach the moment the idle thought flashes across my mind, what the  _ fuck am I thinking? _ Was protecting myself from my own feelings so Dustdamned important that I was willing to risk someone else’s wellbeing? To put off giving help just so I didn’t have to face my own guilt and shame?

It takes me a few moments longer than I like to admit to come to the conclusion that no, I wasn’t that selfish. Yang Xiao Long might not be good for a whole lot these days, but I am at least better than that.

With a destination in mind, I start making my way south east, towards the path I knew and feared  _ oh so well _ . The snow on the path is level and undisturbed, causing another stab of emotion in my chest at the visual reminder that I had been putting off visiting  _ the folks _ for far too long. The burning in my thighs indicative of how deep the snow had gotten.

I walk the path from memory, the visual indicators obviously buried beneath the white powder, and idly I recall the faces of my folks. Of the kind and warm smile of Summer Rose which seemed to get less defined every year that inserted itself between me and the time of her death, but the memory of warm hugs and the sweet aroma of her chocolate chip cookies keep even the vaguest recollections of her from being anything but positive, if bittersweet.

I recall the bright confidence and humor in the face of Taiyang Xiao Long, laugh lines that crinkled at the corner of his eyes, his hair - more pale blond than my own - lightly dusted with grays and whites. I can still remember his voice even over five years since his passing, never reprimanding, never demanding, his was a voice of constant support, gentle advice… and awful, horrible humor.

I got mine from somewhere, after all.

My reminiscence pulls back the closer I get to the gravesite, eyes panning to the trees and snow on either side of me as I scan for any sign of fresh tracks or broken branches, any disturbances at all really, that could tell me where the amber-eyed girl was.

Just when I didn’t think I could miss Zwei anymore, the realization that the old corgi would be able to help me track by scent cutting to the front of my thoughts damn near buckles me, I give my head a hard shake and continue on.

A few minutes longer and I can see the ocean, just over the crested ridge of the cliff’s edge. It was still a few hours from the early dusk the winter season invited, but even still it was a beautiful day, seemingly in spite of the bite of the chilled air and the omnipresent threat of several more inches of snow being possible at seemingly any given moment.

Weiss likes to jokingly call the season in Vale  _ Soft Winters _ , a slight bit of bragging that refers to the fact she grew up in the harsh, perennial cold of Atlas. The truth was that my teammate adored a winter season she could enjoy, and often only referred to her youth spent what I can only assume was a teeth-chattering good time on the continent of Solitas as a jest during the moments Ruby and I were just absolutely sick of being surrounded by snow and ice.

Before I was really emotionally ready - not that I’ve  _ been _ ready in forever - I’m standing before those familiar, heart-breaking headstones.

_ Fuck my life. _

No sign of the amber-eyed girl.

I want to head back down the hill and maybe double back but… my feet won’t move. Rooted by guilt and the need to say something. I mean, it has been awhile.

I was one of the very few people left alive on Remnant that knew - proof positive - of the existence of our absentee dual Gods, of the existence of genuine magic, and the power of resurrection and soul transference.

I know that the dead can be brought back.

So that means there has to be an afterlife, right?

Mom and dad might even be watching me right now, smiling in that sad way that always let me know that they loved me, flaws and all, but that they also expected before from me…  _ for me. _

“H-hey dad, hi mom…” I start, feeling my voice crack as the words escape me. The only response I get is the light wind and the sound of light waves and thin sheets of ice slapping against the rocky crags below the cliff face.

_ For some reason I’ve always found one sided conversations much more difficult. _

“Sorry it’s been awhile. I’d, uh, say I’ve been busy, but you’d know that was a lie. You always wanted me to be honest so I’ll just be… honest,” The words sound lame even before they leave my mouth, but they’re all I can think of in that moment, “I’ve been struggling… for years now, if I’m honest. Ever since Beacon fell really. Dad you only really got to see part of it, and I bet you felt really happy, seeing me rehab physically and take off on my bike to go find Ruby and my friends, but I never really felt healed. I didn’t really get closure, I just kind of…  _ kept living.” _

More silence follows that statement, and I shut my mouth against a seemingly limitless supply of more colorful and shameful admissions, just in case they were there in some capacity. They would know I’m hiding something, the full depth of my regrets, but maybe if I kept them to myself they wouldn’t truly know… they were dead right? They shouldn’t be forced to worry about me in the afterlife.

“H-hey uh… don’t suppose you’ve seen some gal with bright amber eyes wandering around here dressed like a cavewoman, have you?” I venture, a light chuckle escaping my lips. Making jokes was always easier for me, maybe it could see me through this, “The oldest kid from the Birche family - I think - shot her, I’ve been looking for her to maybe bring her to a doc in town and finally ran into her today. She’s…  _ unwell _ , at least she looks that way but she didn’t seem interested in giving me the time of day and ran… you’ll both remember I kind of sucked at hide-and-seek as a kid, so I could really use a leg up here”

_ More silence follows. _

My eyes sting a bit at that, a common reaction whenever I recalled happier days. There had been something of a moratorium declared on the game of hide-and-seek in my family when I was nine, and Ruby had gone missing for a near full twenty-four hours as I sought her.

I remember after the first two hours of looking for her I yelled out into the woods that I wasn’t having fun anymore and that we needed to play something else. Another hours after that was one of the first times I’d scratched at the abilities of my semblance, my anger and frustration at having not yet located my little sister had me red-eyed and furiously smashing against several smaller, slimmer trees, dropping them but simultaneously bloodying my knuckles, my control over my aura not being what it would later become.

I was just sure that once I got my hands on Ruby she was going to get a piece of my mind.

An hour after that I was sobbingly telling my father and uncle that Ruby was missing, the anger erased, replaced instead by fear and concern. No matter how much I had called out to the trees, the familiar woods we’d played in for the entirety of our lives, nothing responded but the wind…

… and the distant slapping of waves again the cl-

“Wait a minute” My statement cuts the memory short and after a second more I’m digging out my scroll.

I hope that Ruby was still within range of the CCT, my last conversation with her a week ago revealed to me that she was going to be residing in Mantle for the foreseeable future, and that her makeshift team - consisting of Weiss, Jaune and Penny - had to split in half for a few weeks while Weiss went to Argus to look into family business matter while Penny was due some scheduled maintenance, while Ruby and Jaune would do rotating shifts with other Hunters, patrolling the south eastern coast of the frozen continent, sussing out whatever pockets of Grimm they could find along the way.

It would be night there, which  _ should _ mean that Ruby and Jaune’s camp or outpost was set up, a roaring fire or portable generator providing them heat as the chill of the evening settled in. Hopefully my little sister was awake.

I press the contact panel beside Ruby’s name and bring the scroll to my face, the sound of the dial tone a definite sign in my favor that she’s still within spitting distance of the CCT.

A couple of rings later and my sister’s voice cuts through the speaker.

“Hey Yang!”

I’ll be honest, I nearly drop the phone right then and there as my sister’s naturally perky, cheerful demeanor blasts through the speaker as an  _ oh-so-soothing _ ten-trillion decibels louder than it needs me. Moreover, the absolute glee and cheerfulness just her greeting possesses is the equivalent of having a more sour person’s - in this case, me - subconscious be viciously gored by a unicorn.

I love my sister, but as the years have gone on I have started to identify more and more with the Weiss Schnee that would routinely melt down on my sister over her youthful exuberance.

“Hello Ruby,” The urge to smile at hearing her voice in any situation gets stamped down as my eyes dart between our parents’ headstones, “sorry if I’m interrupting your sleep or anything, I just… I needed to ask you something very important”

“Don’t worry about it sis, I’ll take your calls literally day or night, and all Jaune and I were doing was roasting smores!” Ruby’s voice comes out like a cheer, and between Tai and Summer’s graves I swear I feel myself almost crack and start crying, deep breaths Yang, this isn’t the time, “Anyhow, what’s up?”

“Okay, this is going to sound a bit strange, but do you remember when you were seven and got lost in the woods while we were playing hide and seek?” I can hear my sister’s thoughtful  _ ‘Hmmm’ _ on the other end, no doubt trying to force her recollection to catch up with the conversation, after a few seconds I try to paint in more details, to jod her memory, “Uncle Qrow found you after dark, said you’d somehow found an outcropping on the cliff’s face that led to an old cave, climbed down to it and then couldn’t find your way back up…”

“OH YEAH!” Ruby shouts and once again I think about how lucky my phone is to not be airborne in this very second, “Oh geez, I haven’t thought of that place in forever, after the lecture dad gave me when Qrow brought me back I never even thought of heading back there…”

A chuckle manages to escape my lips at the vague recollections of that memory, my father didn’t really  _ do _ the yelling, vein-popping displays of anger thing. That was something that was more part and parcel in Weiss’ unfortunate upbringing.

_ Brothers _ , Taiyang Xiao Long could make you feel horrible and guilty with but a withering, teary-eyed look though, and that night had been a veritable highlight reel of familial  **_I’m-not-mad-I’m-just-disappointed_ ** designs, both at Ruby’s carelessness and the fact that my hands needed stitches by the end of my hour three tantrum.

“So what brought that up?” Ruby’s voice loses some of its brightness, tinged with curiosity and concern. I wasn’t exactly prone to calling over reminiscence, after all.

I take a second to debate how much I want to say, not that I don’t trust my sister, she’s about one of maybe five people that has my implicit trust and love in just about everything, it’s just that well… I doubt this amber-eyed girl would appreciate me sharing knowledge of her existence.

I wouldn’t lie though.

“Search and rescue, and the rescue is not all that enthused about being found” Keep it vague, Yang, “eldest Birche kid clipped her while hunting, came to me talking about how he injured and endangered, and wanted me to find her. Took me a couple days but I ran into her earlier...  _ and _ without my other gauntlet she was able to run away, I’ve been searching for days and when I got up to… mom and dad’s graves without catching sight of her, I just kind of  _ remembered _ the infamous hide-and-seek incident”

“Damn, is it a wolf?” Genuine curiosity now.

“I’m not quite sure what she is, but she’s definitely wild” I respond much smoother than I expect.

“Not sure… how do you know it’s a girl then?” Ruby inquires and I can hear the smile in her voice.

_ Shit. _

“Because only a female can give me a headache this bad” I state flatly, earning a bark of laughter from my little sister.

Shame that, given the events that have led to this point of my life, that wasn’t me making a sexist joke so much as stating a brutal fact. Salem, Cinder, Neo, fucking Raven…  **_her…_ ** and now - possibly - whoever this amber-eyed girl was.

Provided I’m not fucking up my pronouns, that is.

“So do you remember where the cave was?” I press, hoping my urgency comes across.

“Well, it’s a little hazy in my mind, but the outcropping was like,  _ right near _ mom… and dad now too… I guess” The strain in my sister’s voice hurts me just to hear, “Uh, no telling what shape the outcropping is so be careful, also the cave itself was a  _ lot _ bigger than what I expected it to be back then, so whatever your chasing will have room to maneuver, be careful okay?”

“Careful is my middle name Ruby” A flagrant lie, but I try to fill the statement with as much cheer as I can fake, just to lighten the mood, “I’ll have this… whatever she is to the doc… er, vet in no time”

“Oh no! Not Doc Paws-and-Claws!” Ruby gasps, no doubt remembering the ornery veterinarian that had drawn the short straw of being Zwei’s mortal enemy during the dog’s surprisingly spry and long life.

The chuckle that escapes me as I recall the mighty flea infestation of 2004 - and the ensuing battle between the corgi’s attempts to kill the good doctor and the doc’s valiant effort to ensure the infestation didn’t spread across the entire island - is very real.

“Hey, Doc Peckinpah is a good man!” I jest laughingly, in truth he was a miserable bastard, but the fact he continued practicing after dealing with Zwei’s brand of chaos for the entirety of the little dog’s life spoke of nothing but a true urge to help the animal population at large.

_ Though the fact that I wasn’t going to be dragging an animal - let alone this injured woman - anywhere near a vet to begin with kind of made the small white lie sting a little. _

“Anyways Ruby, I’m killing daylight here,” The smile that had worked its way onto my face during the conversation cracks a little at the thought of this talk coming to an end, but I really did need to keep moving, “you take care and keep warm up there and Atlas, I totally know you’re making Jaune be the big spoon anyways”

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaang!” Ruby whines, and in the background I can hear the telltale laughter of one Jaune Arc, no doubt privy to me teasing my baby sister.

“Give him my best too, and stay safe, I love you” I finish.

“I love you too Yang” Ruby returns.

With a tap of my scroll’s screen, the connection is severed and the call ends, leaving me alone once again, or at the very best, surrounded by the silent ghosts I yearned more than anything to see again.

It takes me a few minutes of wandering the ridge, steps cautious. I’d been out on this ledge a lot throughout my life, but between the salt-water breeze, the lapping and erosion of the waves, and the winter ice and snow that had built up, it was never a good idea to trust the ledge of being safe or stable.

It was far too easy to go over the edge, and while I - better than most - had plenty of tricks in my  _ survive-falling-from-a-great-height _ handbook, it certainly didn’t make for a fun prospect to crack that proverbial book open.

I’d learned years ago that living through a long fall didn’t mean you necessarily survived.

Eventually I spot it though, a rocky bit of ledge poking out a few feet from the rest of the cliff face, the distance was negligible, a short seven feet from the top of the ridgeline. The only question was whether it was strong enough to take my weight.

It took a minute of deliberation, but with no way to tell save for throwing a person of equal weight down onto it, there was really no way to tell than to just do it, so I stepped off the ridgeline and let gravity do the rest.

I landed securely on the ledge, no shaking, no crumbling, no falling into the cold water and ice below, so…  _ bonus, _ I guess.

I hug the cliff face as I shimmy around the ledge carefully, a couple of seconds pass and I have to say, I am genuinely shocked to see the cave mouth. It is - or  _ was, _ provided the woman I’m chasing is in there - the perfect hiding spot, a large elm, seemingly years past dead but decades from withering and falling over stood as a shield to both the elements and any prying eyes.

I’m not really known for being all that stealthy, it wasn’t really known as being my jam when I was with my team in Beacon. I was the Sunny Dragon, loud and boisterous and bombastic, and everything about me in a fight seemed to reflect that. I didn’t work the angles or try to sneak attack an enemy, I rushed forward with intent to settle the fight quick, dirty and violent.

That was something I had actually been proud of for a long time, that I was the frontal assault of my team, but when things had gotten real, when the stakes of our fights had gotten upped, it was a label that followed me. I was the wall, I was the tip of the spear.

**_Yang Xiao Long was the front line in any battle._ **

It was only later in the war when I truly realized how I’d pigeonholed myself and narrowed my talents in the eyes of any source of command. When I did realize exactly how anyone in command did look at me and regard my assets, I was forced to all but insist being placed outside the box, if only to broaden the scope of my abilities.

Everyone knew I could fight, but could I gather intel? Could I be stealthy?

Those missions - experimental as they were - seem so long ago at this very moment, as I creep up to the entrance of the cave and hug the wall. Peering around as slowly and smoothly as I could before ducking back out onto the ledge.

There was a glow from deeper within, likely from a small fire, which meant that in all likelihood, the amber-eyed girl was here. Unless one of the locals had taken to spelunking near gravesites as a hobby.

So, my options were either to sneak in, or walk in like I own the place… or maybe wait outside until the amber-eyed girl’s paranoia loses out to her hunger and she comes to me.

Yang Xiao Long is also not a patient person.

Besides, what happens if I’m sitting out here all slick and devious while she was laid out with an unknown injury from her earlier flight from me? I’d feel like a right tit then.

_ Fuck it, _ in I go.

I keep my steps measured and slow, and try to make the shadows cast from both the entrance and the light further in to see if there are any traps set up. I cast my aura out slightly from my skin’s surface, try to keep any lighter traps from hitting me directly and giving me some wiggle room if I set off anything like a snare.

When I reach the entrance to the larger part of the cave I’m genuinely shocked to see it’s size, as well as the condition it was in. This wasn’t just some cave that someone had stumbled into a couple weeks ago and decided to hole up in, this was damn near a  _ home. _

In the middle, silhouetted by the fire, free of the pile of furs on one end of the cave and the basins, likely for washing and waste, is  _ her _ .

She’s facing away from me, so the details are not in sight, hidden by the large cloak of animal pelts, she’s hunched down, and shockingly, disturbingly  _ still _ .

“Ah  **_fuck!_ ** ” There’s no further thoughts of stealth as I rush forward, aura dropping and sliding to my knees behind the woman, my hand reaches out to grab her shoulder and suddenly I’m… there’s…

_ She’s gone in a puff of black smoke. _

I’ve dealt with illusionists before, people whose semblance allows them to conjure up tricks of the eye and even other senses. Some are covert…  _ subtle _ , allowing only the minds of those chosen to see something different of the semblance user’s choosing, a woman named Emerald Sustrai had once nearly sunk my entire life into the pits because of such a power.

Others, such as this ice-cream themed psychopath named Neopolitan, could cast illusions that affected the entire world around them, making something appear as something else until they chose to break it.

Both of the women in my examples were long dead, casualties of war, but I knew first hand how dangerous they could be in the hands of someone cunning.

Which is why I should fucking  _ know  _ better.

I feel wire dig into the flesh on my neck, a dark blur passing before my face, a weight anchored against the thread, quickly I throw up my left hand, catching the line over the yellow gauntlet that has remained in it’s unactivated bracelet form.

A genuine fight has a way of dilating time in weird ways. There were days-long battles that flashed by in minutes in my mind, hundreds of Grimm and other Hunters and Huntresses wiped out in what seemed like seconds. Encounters that would go down in history as being tide-turning or drawn out bloodbaths of give-and-take attrition.

Then there were the more intimate, one-on-one moments like this, where everything slows to a crawl. I can’t move or react any faster, but it feels like I’m hyper aware of everything occurring around me. I hear the raspy growl from behind me, I risk turning my head slightly to the left letting the bite of the wire dig into my neck a little further, following the path of the gray-and-black blur that had sped past my vision.

I see scarred and dirty fingers catch the object… a blade, a blade wrapped in athletic tape for a makeshift handle, what used to be off-white adhesive stained near pitch black as the blade itself.

With my left arm keeping the wire from wrapping fully around my neck I respond on instinct, raising my loaner prosthetic up above my head to defend my vitals as I see the blade raised high and brought down with zero hesitation. This amber-eyed girl wasn’t just afraid of me, she was absolutely prepared to kill me without a second thought, wonderful.

The blade goes through the hand of the prosthetic with the force of the stab, but luckily the internals of it, gears, servois and frame seem to ensure it stays stuck. I would normally give thanks for this good fortune, except the feedback algorithms of the limb mean I just feel like I’ve been  **_stabbed through the fucking hand!_ **

I scramble to my feet, taking away the leverage of the amber-eyed girl’s higher position before she can rip the blade free and this crazy bitch responds by bodily jumping onto my back. I manage to get my aura up in time to avoid having her bite out my carotid artery with her teeth, but the action of her sharp canines driving into my neck basically guarantees there’s going to be a frighteningly dark bruise there in a couple of hours.

Unless of course she succeeds in killing me.

She’s clinging to me with one hand while trying to yank her blade out of my hand and goddammit it  _ hurts. _ I feel her legs wrap around my waist as I struggle to shake her off, hoping my aura keeps as it stands up to the wire at the right side of my neck.

_ The wire… _ as soon as I snapped that I’d be in a much better position to fend the amber-eyed girl off, and then with some luck and patience calm her down.

I extend the gauntlet on my left wrist, earning a startled gasp of surprise, then a raspy cry of dismay as realization seems to settle in on my attacker. I’d feel bad later, the pains in either side of my neck and hand simply wouldn’t allow me to feel a whole lot of remorse in this moment.

With that, I fire the gauntlet off, satisfied as the wire against my neck slackens as the point of it across my gauntlet snaps immediately, the enclosed space of the cave makes the shot reverberate through my skull so loudly I almost black out, and I’m pretty sure my ears are going to be ringing for awhile. The recoil of the blast drives my arm down into the amber-eyed girl’s leg and that’s when I feel the telltale give of bone and cartilage beneath my elbow.

I most definitely just destroyed this woman’s knee, where was her aura?! She was too good and far too fast to not have her aura unlocked…

Whatever the damage, all attempts at grasping to me seem to have been abandoned as she drops to the floor in a groaning, heaping mess. I spin quickly, gauntleted hand raised in case it was a trick, and what I see causes me to recoil.

The cloak of fur had fallen off during the fight, and those amber eyes that I’d made contact with earlier, so sharp and observant, were now cloudy and unfocused. She was breathing rapidly, which made sense, given how her knee was bending the exact opposite way it was designed to, she was likely going into shock.

“O-oh fuck! Hey!, Hey stay with me…” I drop down to my knees alongside her, the pain receptors in my prosthetic sending pangs of pain to my nervous system, but they’re thankfully dulled and muted by the sensory overload.

With the cloak and hood gone, I spot a pair of cat ears perched atop her head, although one appears to have been damaged, given the scar that ran deep into it, bisecting black fur with a ruddy red line of tissue, I also see that my assumptions about her nutrition and health were either dead-on, or close enough for government work. The furs she’s surrounded with are damn near swimming over the knobby protrusions of her ribs. Long limbs appearing almost spindly with the lack of definition or fat on them.

“C’mon, don’t pass out, I know you’re hurting.... But I’m going to get you help okay?” I retract my gauntlet before tipping her face slightly so we can make eye contact, I doubt she sees me though, her eyes aren’t focusing and the only thing leaving her lips besides rapid gasps of air are the occasional groan or telling gurgle of… oh  _ shit. _

I do my best to turn her onto her side gently - so as to not agitate her left knee or… ugh, her visibly infect left arm, which is raised and red around what I  _ presume _ to be farm boy’s bullet wound - but my main concern is in making sure she doesn’t die right there from choking on her own vomit.

I’m more alarmed than anything that the only thing that escapes her is a bit of water and stomach acid.

She’s shivering when I roll her onto her back once again, so I grab the cloak that had dropped from her and drape it over her, then spot the slight excess of dry wood stacked up near one of the walls. I grab a few logs and toss them on the flame before kneeling back down beside the amber-eyed girl… only those amber eyes are now closed.

“ _ Fuck, fuck, fuck… _ ”

In my haste to check her pulse I almost use my prosthetic hand, which would have been a nightmare considering a good several inches of blade were jutting through the palm of it, after a calming breath, I reach down with my flesh and blood one, and find a rapid and weak pulse.

Relief sets in that she hadn’t simply died right there, but it’s short lived when I consider the fact that she likely wasn’t far off, I reach into my jacket and pull out my scroll. It takes me a few seconds longer to pull up the contact info one handed, but I quickly hit dial and lift the device to my ear.

“Hello Yang it’s good to hear from y-”

“Velvet, sorry to cut you off Buns but I’m in a situation, do you and Coco still have those sleds ready to go?” I blurt out quickly. Luckily Velvet and I had been in the same business, so she knew when there was simply no time for social grace, that there were simply times where one just had to act and react to the information they were given.

Times like  _ right fucking now. _

“They’re fueled and ready to go, Ren’s on with me today, need us over at your house?” Any traces of humor in her odd, normally jovial accent are nowhere to be found. Bless that woman.

“Need you north of my house, right at the northern lip of the island, I’ll text you the grid reference once this is over, I am literally in a cave where the entrance is just over the lip of the ridgeline,” I take a deep breath, recalling the pertinent information to give in these situations, “injured is a faunus female, age anywhere from mid-teens to mid-thirties, malnourished, injured left knee, probable broken bones,  _ definite ligament damage, _ and a possible blood infection from a wound on her left arm. Person is currently passed out from pain and shock and I’m pretty sure she’s suffering from severe aura fatigue. Bring a backboard and rope…”

There’s a pause on the other end and I think I might have to repeat myself.

“Vel-”

“Are you injured as well Yang?” Velvet’s voice is tinged with concern, and it’s well founded too. In the background of the call I think I can hear Lie Ren running around the practice, gathering supplies.

“Just a blade through the prosthetic and a couple of abrasions around my neck. Get here fast, this gal is in bad shape” I can hear the plea in my own voice as I make it.

“We’ll be there in twenty, barring us crashing, keep your arse safe until we get there”

_ Click! _

With that I quickly bring up a map of the island and tap the grid overlay option, dividing the island up into small square kilometers. I zoom in on the ridge my parent’s graves occupy and eyeball a ten figure grid manually, sketching it out with my finger in the dirt before opening my messenger app and relaying the grid to text itself and sending it off.

With that done, I quickly walk over to the pile of skins and furs that were no doubt the amber-eyed girl’s sleeping area, grabbing several out I lay them out beside the unconscious woman, moving her was going to be a pain one-handed, but it needed to be done if I was hoping to secure her safely for transport.

“This is gonna suck,” I hear myself say with a confidence I don’t actually feel, “but you’re going to be okay…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Deep breath* 
> 
> ...
> 
> *Lots of screaming*
> 
> Okay so this took much longer than I expected to get out, unfortunately between life and work, my interest in writing has suffered a blow. That said, I kind of like how this turned out, though I must admit that writing a combat scene from the first person perspective is an interesting challenge I'm not sure I nailed.
> 
> Also, I finally decided to name farmboy's family, and even gave the vet a name in this chapter. I'm not using the OC tag though because they're not that important, just NPCs in the game of Yang Xiao Long's life.
> 
> I'm really excited by the prospect of showing how characters from the show moved on with their lives in this canon divergence, even though I have no idea how to name a team consisting of Ruby, Weiss, Penny and Jaune.
> 
> Oh, and of course why Velvet and Ren are running a small town practice.
> 
> As always, Comments, creative criticisms and kudos are always welcome.


	5. These Bitter Roots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An intruder breaks her of the last illusion of safety, she'll fight to maintain it. She will kill for it.
> 
> Afterwards, a memory that lives between thinking and doing.

She’s back in familiar territory, _her domain_. Knee throbbing and winded, feeling her mouth flood with saliva to aid in the process of trying to vomit, but between her paranoia and will to keep silent she manages to fight the nausea down.

_Even with desperation clawing at her throat._

She limps over to the embers of the dwindling fire she’d left behind a mere hour ago and throws several more bits of splintered tinder into the flame, trying to stoke it’s growth and keep the sweat beading on her brow from chilling to her grimy, sticky skin.

She knows she should move, then. Relocate her safe haven to somewhere else on the island until such a time she can find a way to escape it entirely. She knows she should be packing and bundling up her meager supplies and setting out due East, close enough to the shoreline to make use of the ever-abundant fish in the sea when the weather thaws. She knows it should be a no-brainer, that the north-eastern side of the island is dense and heavily packed with growth to such a degree that it simply spoke of the entire lack of humanity there.

She knows that it’s usually worth it to risk the higher concentration of Grimm that likely occupied the area of the island, that it yielded literally non-existent foot traffic, and that the trade-off for such comfort lay in increased distances to travel when she needed to hunt.

She knows all of this. Knows what she _should_ do. Knows the contingencies and the promises made to herself in order to keep herself alive and safe at all costs, even in the face of such inconveniences as having to work harder and longer to make her position unassailable.

**_She will admit that it was people that truly rested in the shadows of her fears, not Grimm._ **

Yet still, with all of those thoughts, those plans and inclinations, that pragmatic willingness to put herself into discomfort just to allay her fear and apprehension, it’s a simple realization that settles in on her stomach like a lead weight. A cold wave of simple fact that washes over her, cooling her blood and marrow so much more effectively than the bitter bite of wind and snow ever could.

She simply wasn’t able to.

It was obvious in the leaden weight throbbing and near-pinning her swollen left arm to her side, in the way that she still couldn’t capture her breath after barely avoiding the blonde-haired tower of muscle that had given chase through the woods, in the stabbing ache of hunger in her belly and the grinding cartilage of her knee.

There was nothing left in the tank, physical and mental attributes so thoroughly drained and taxed that the very idea of considering stepping outside again - to say nothing of trying to pack and move her entire _life_ \- was crippling in how daunting it seemed to her right then.

For the first time since she’d made her way off the grid and into a life of seclusion, she physically had no other choice than to sit back, and hope for the best.

It’s not a stretch to say that the fear and anxiety in that simple reality compounds into a crushing weight, so heavy and omnipresent that she falls to her right, undamaged knee, her left leg shooting out before her in a bid to not aggravate the damage there further as she can feel her pulse increase in rapidity, matching her ragged gulps of air as the world around her seems to blur.

**_She couldn’t run, she couldn’t run, she couldn’t run_ **.

It felt foolish to hope that the cave, what served as her warped perception of home, of a bastion of relief meant to ward the curious and cruel eyes of a world that had long ago set her to be a target and a victim of circumstance, would be hidden and out-of-the-way, enough so that the danger she faced this time, in this case defined by powerful muscles and lilac eyes, would simply pass her by unawares.

A cave mouth, hidden behind a dead tree, along a small, unassuming rocky outcropping facing the ocean, was it too much to ask for? Too much to wish that the place she lay her head at night would continue to remain undiscovered? 

She stares into the flames of the cave’s fire, the smoke and heat dissipating through a series of smaller holes that tunneled out, dispersing the telltale signs of flame into smaller, less visible escapes. She lets the heat wash over her, trying to bring her blood above the ice-like grip it held in her veins, to get it flowing through her body as it was meant to.

It takes about fifteen minutes until she hears her reality crashing back down around her head for the second time that day.

If it weren’t for her faunus-given traits - muted though her ability to hear was with the bear-pelt cloak pulled tightly over her head - she wouldn’t have caught it, the distance between the entrance and where she kneels currently and the soft crackle of flame consuming dried wood guaranteed to drown out the soft landing of footfalls were she human or birthed as a different type of her species.

Her vision blurs, the moisture in her mouth vanishes, and her pulse is once again pounding in her ears.

_Who the hell was this blonde woman?_

The whispers of the intruder’s breath are just as telling to her as if she were witnessing the woman’s face with her own eyes, they were calm, slow and measured. A light rasping at the end doing an admirable job as far as a human went for cutting the exhalation short and quiet. 

This intruder was cautious, and for as much fear and adrenaline pumping through her veins right now, she took solace that she would be granted a few extra moments to plan because of that caution.

She knows then that she’d have to either kill or incapacitate the lilac-eyed woman, the _intruder_ that had doggedly tried tracking her over the course of the week, and had found her in a position she had once believed to be unassailable.

If she incapacitated her opponent, she would doubtlessly have to relocate, **_but_ **… if she killed this intruder, this woman, then maybe she could stay, at least until she was better, and then when the snow had melted and the ice had thawed, she could move on.

It wouldn’t even be a challenge to dispose of the blonde woman’s body, a quick shove off the ledge outside the cave mouth and she’d be the ocean’s problem.

_That settles it then._

She’s aware that in another time and place, the thought of committing murder so pragmatically would have turned her stomach. Fortunately as the seasons of loneliness had passed, and paranoia had taken root as it’s very own sense in her mind, the self-hatred and judgement of the woman she was, the woman she’d become, lessened and faded into nothingness.

Killing the intruder was simply the best option, now she just had to figure out the best option for killing the intruder.

In the scant few seconds she’d had to observe the blonde woman, she had to take measure of the facts as well as make assumptions from there. While that wasn’t necessarily a perfect system and had led to a lot of unwanted surprises as she’d fought and lived through the continent of Anima seasons ago, it was better than not making any assumptions at all. 

As she had heard countless times before, ‘every plan was perfect until first contact’. Which meant that even with facts and assumptions, it was on her shoulders to be malleable and smart enough to alter any and all plans she was involved in at a moment’s notice.  
  


The facts were this, whoever this intruder was, she was physically powerful, bulging muscle and vitality bolstered by a taller, long-limbed frame that dwarfed _hers._ Aura might have levelled that out, but she was well past reserves in regards to that crutch.

It may have been an assumption, but something in the way the lilac-eyed stranger carried herself, like a fearless apex predator storming through the forests of the island alone, told her that her opponent wasn’t just visually powerful, but strong where it counted too, that spoke to training - be it military, sport, or _Maidens’ forbid_ a Hunter’s Academy - and that ran the risk of this stranger having an activated aura herself.

In short, a stand up fight was out of the question.

One of the other options lay in setting a trap, or if time permitted, a series of traps. She spoke in the language of sabotage even before she’d turned herself into a reliant, solitary being. With enough time and preparation, as well as some keen observation of her quarry, she could fell those far more powerful than she had ever been by making use of the environment, terrain, and studying how an opponent was likely to react once the first snare was triggered.

She gives her head a shake, suppressing the urge to growl at letting her mind wander for even a moment, _the enemy wasn’t just at the gates, they were through them, there was simply_ **_no fucking time._ **

With that thought, the answer was clear as day, _subversion and misdirection_ . This blonde was walking into what had been hard fought to be her own, pathetic little slice of life. This was her den, **_her home,_ ** for as feeble her surroundings were compared to those assertions. The lilac-eyed woman was an invader and needed to be dealt with by the only means left.

She needed to lower the blonde’s guard and catch her by surprise. No wasted movement, nothing fancy, just get behind her and stick her _friend_ through something vital that the lilac-eyed woman simply could not walk away from.

How though?

She can hear the intruder’s soft footfalls slowly creeping in, could hear the cadence of the blonde’s pulse betraying her steady breathing. She had maybe a minute… if she was lucky.

_Focus… focus…_ **_focus…_ **

She knew what she needed to do, kneeling there with her knee throbbing in pain, bile rising in her throat and weapon sliding securely into the hand of her uninjured arm. The matter of doing it though? Especially with how hard it had been to summon her aura for a brief while just earlier that day? It seemed monumental… borderline impossible.

The possibility of death has a way of making the unthinkable seem all the more doable, though. 

A mild comfort, but one she was never all too keen to rely on unless in the most dire of circumstances.

She couldn’t conceive of anything more dire than imminent death or capture. There had to be something left, a thread of aura she could pull on, _anything_ to activate her…

**_… the intruder is just outside the main area…_ **

Her teeth are gritting so hard she can feel the faint itch of blood trickling down unkempt gums, breath hissing out of her as she bows her head and tries to push all distractions out, one deep breath past a thick tongue, eyes close so she can’t note the unshed tears gathering there.

Activating one’s semblance was always a matter of when rather than _if_ once someone’s aura became unlocked - and that’s **_if_ ** they had an aura - the memories on how she came to know hers were blurry, just like much of her recollection, but she knew what it was now, and knew it well, she just needed to grasp that feeling before the intruder reached her…

_… and just an iota of her aura to power it._

**THERE!**

There’s no breath to be heard behind her in that moment, no doubt the blonde holding it in as she walked journeyed into the threshold of what constituted her home, she doesn’t need to hear the intruder’s breath though, she can hear the blood pumping in her veins. She’s being _seen_ a moment later. She can tell by the quick exhale and the shuffle of the lilac-eyed woman’s steps.

A second passes and she grasps onto that small bit of aura.

“Ah **_fuck!_ **”

She hears the intruder start towards where she’s knelt awkwardly, and with that realization she… well, she would never describe it as moving, or even teleporting as had been suggested to her by others back in those rare, fleeting days she felt comfortable enough around others to show them her semblance.

It was more of a _shift_.

A one-to-one shadow copy of herself left behind while her conscious mind and body appeared in a direction of her choosing.

It had once been disorienting for her, to go from one place to another instantaneously. Her first few experiments with her latent ability so jarring and nauseating that she’d spent the better part of the day after testing it out laid up in bed, slamming pedialytes and hating life in equal measure.

Now it was almost comforting in both it’s utility and it’s familiarity. It was one of the few things she knew to truly be _hers._ Something that she truly knew nobody could take away from her.

She can see the blonde before her, kneeling behind her copy, a brief flash of annoyance passes over her as she realizes she didn’t time it well enough to make her strike before her shadow clone dissipated at the blonde’s touch, but she would have to make do.

She unwinds the fishing line from around her wrist quickly - sending a silent cheer to whatever deity dared to smile down on her that day that she hadn’t elected to detach it from the hilt of her blade, _her friend_ , and waste more time when there simply was none to spare.

The lilac-eyed woman touches the clone and it disintegrates in a black cloud. She throws the blade of _her friend_ in a wide right arc, a practiced snare throw, trying to loop the wire around the mysterious woman’s neck and distract her while she closes the distance.

The moment she rushes, she feels like every detail around her comes into focus. Her left knee throbs, her lungs _burn_ in adrenaline fueled anticipation, she can see the blonde’s shoulder’s tense, her entire body language shift into that of an aggressor.

Luckily, the blade and fishing line has already made its way past her head, unless the blonde had an incredible reaction time or a semblance she simply couldn’t account for, this plan would go off perfectly.

The wire meets the blonde’s neck and it becomes obvious her aura either hadn’t been activated or was simply down. She’s a few steps away then, right hand reaching out to capture her blade - _her friend_ \- and finish this painlessly.

_She has no words to describe the moment the blonde’s left arm shoots up and hooks the wire on her bizarre yellow bracelet before it can wrap around the other side of her neck._

Lilac eyes track her _friend_ all the way to the point it gets caught in her grasp again. She still has the advantage of surprise over the intruder, she’s standing, armed, and more than willing to kill to protect her interests.

She aims to do so without hesitation, raising the blade with a steady, strong hand before plunging it down in a stabbing motion… which puts it clean through the blonde’s right hand.

That’s when the animal in her comes to life, not in the fleeing, not in the fighting, but in the exact seconds she realizes that this blonde woman, with the kind lilac eyes she didn’t trust and the weird golden bracelet, who was willing to race after her through miles of dense foliage and waist high snow, had the instincts to throw the concept of bodily harm to the wind in favor of protecting her own _life._

The moment she realizes that this intruder knew how to survive, without care to the cost of herself.

The moment this graduates from a slipshod murder, into a standup fight.

Her vision closes in black, her mind and consciousness shutting her out of visual perception, as though protecting and shielding her from the reality that her instinct is controlling her actions. Her self-awareness can’t seen an inch in front of her face, yet she’s hyper aware of other senses, she can smell blood… hers and the intruder’s, she can feel her body… not the pain or the infection, but rather the pressure of exhaustion, as it carries on the fight without her guiding the motions.

She feels the taste of strange flesh on her tongue, the satisfying strain of muscles in her jaw as she attempts to chomp down on the heat of the intruder's skin, to pierce and set free the flesh and blood there, though oddly enough, the taste of copper never touches her tongue.

She hears the grunts from the blonde, the curses, her own feral growling… then she hears **_it._ **

Metal and gears reacting in a sharp, machined and well oiled way.

Then the world drops away from her in stages, the echoing blast of a shell turns all of her auditory perception into a dull whistle, simultaneously her ability to see simply pops back in as the tension on the fishing line gets snapped…

… _and then?_ **_Pain._ **

She's overcome by blissful oblivion for who knows how long. A second? Hours?

She opens her eyes and her eyes refuse to focus, she cannot hear past the ringing, she cannot catch her breath. Why is it so cold all of sudden? She knows there’s all that and more wrong. Is she dying?

Is this death?

She tries to take stock of her physical well being and nothing seems to work or react the way it’s supposed to. Her left arm is impossibly heavy, her left knee doesn’t seem to move at all except to send rapidly increasing echoes of pain.

Why can’t she take a deep breath?

Is it hot in here? Is it cold?

…

There’s a blur of prominent color above her in that moment, the pitch in her ears lowering to a dull roar with the occasional, heavily distorted warble of something overtop.

The color is bright, almost yellow… with two traces of lilac…

She feels the black start to close in again as the sound fades away to nothing, the yellow and lilac fading out until there’s nothing.

She’s nothing.

_…_

_…_

_They had needed to wait about another week to get a full complement to their indoc course. In that short time span the information had come quick and dirty._

_They were housed in their training bunks for the time being simply because there was no other place to put them; A squat eight-section modular tent. The outer shell composed entirely of black canvas, with the supports themselves being gun-grey metal that was built to withstand the harsh winds and climbs of just about any continent in the civilized world. From the ice of Solitas to the arid deserts of western Sanus._

_There had been a series of cloth dividers should the recruits have wished to separate their accommodations by gender or even by racial subtype - the challenge of being such a diverse species was largely in accounting not only the differences between carnivores, herbivores and omnivores, but also in sleeping habits such as those that were naturally nocturnal - but the idea was voted down unanimously by the recruits themselves._

_They were there to be one, a united front against human oppression, they would deal with the difficulties of living openly with so many new and different people, and they wouldn’t deal with it by sacrificing their ideals on even the most sleight of details._

_She’d hidden a grin behind a book as several bunk mates tossed the cloth dividers out of the tent, both at being impressed by the level of unity already being shown amongst mere trainees, but also that nobody mentioned the_ **_fortunate_ ** _side effect of the cloth being tossed was that it allowed for a breeze to roll through the area, and in the deep woods of Anima, where the still, humid heat was stifling, that feeling was almost godly._

_There’s another part of her that’s relieved - if not a little disheartened - to see that the majority of her tent mates are clad in their provided physical training outfits like she was in the off hours from daily tasks or drills. That meant that the sheer majority of people she was going to be fighting beside as they learned to rally their cause against humanity simply hadn’t had anything but the clothes on their backs when they joined up._

**_Just like her._ **

_She’d felt foolish when she’d finally managed to track down a recruiter, having simply forgotten to bring a bag with any belongings or keepsakes, but she’d been assured, the recruiter’s voice calm and face sympathetic, that her needs would be taken care of._

_The faunus looked after the faunus, after all._

_So there she sat, reading a book borrowed from one of the kitchen ladies - a kangaroo faunus that had taken a shine to her after three days of exhaustive potato peeling without a single complaint - and shifting as her own skin tries to get used to the seams and stitching of a simple set of red sweat shorts and a red t-shirt._

_It seemed that even the physical training outfits they’d been issued were much the same as their day-to-day uniforms. Uncomfortable until they were broken in._

_The abrasions and blisters on her feet spoke much the same about both the combat boots and cheaply manufactured running shoes they’d been issued as well, though several of the older recruits and training staff around the camp had highly encouraged that new recruits buy new running shoes when they got their recruit pay in._

_She remembers staring in open mouthed shock as a staff member had regaled them with tales about the faunus traders that stopped in at the camp twice a month to ply their trade. About the amenities even a first week trainee could get if they saved and scoured properly._

_It all seemed so much more civilized than she figured it would, and the idea of it alone had helped to ease the tension and quell the ache of homesickness that would occasionally blossom in her chest._

_She remembers how the staff member laughed when she asked if they carried books._

_Slipping a small, torn piece of cardboard between her spot in the book, she’d set it down between her legs, itching to read more into the pulpy romance novel, yet restraining herself from doing so. She was a voracious literary imbiber, and it would only suck worse to burn through her reading material and be left with none at all._

_As such, she’d taken to people watching to fill the time._

_Back in Menagerie, if she’d found herself without a novel to pour over into the wee hours of the morning, she’d have likely opted to thumb through the news and the network on her scroll._

_From the twitching and lost eyes floating around on the visages of her fellow bunkmates, they normally would be too._

_No scrolls was a hard rule in the camp, the training staff, the officers, even the ancillary support contingent responsible for day-to-day drudgery behind the scenes - like latrine upkeep - made sure to continue to stress it. A scroll was a portal into the information age at large, breaking news and entertainment available at the touch of a button provided one was within range of a CCT tower, the trade off of course was that any information gleaned from the net could also be transmitted._

_Like say, the location and numbers of a group of freedom fighters that were routinely being slandered and hunted down by the jackbooted thugs of Atlas._

_It was a threat to them, plain and simple, as such they were told not to bring them to begin with. Anybody that ignored that initial warning was given sandbag-filling detail for the next week as punishment between dinner and lights out._

**_Even still_ ** _, she and the other new recruits were subjected to a pat down and additional screening._

_Luckily, it didn’t appear that anyone had been caught trying to hide a scroll on them or their luggage._

_Her interactions had remained minimal with those around her, not to say she was impolite, it was just that her feeling out process took time… sometimes a painful amount of it, it had often led to misunderstandings in both her home life and her travels alongside her parents._

_As a child, her fellow faunus didn’t understand how a member of their species with such predatory traits exhibited a shy and borderline skittish nature._

_In her travels, well, the cruelty of several members of their species had led to her long associating them with negative connotations, and so she just chose not to engage them on any level._

_There hadn’t been a human since she took that stance who had proven she should do otherwise._

_Nevertheless, even in a place as familiar as Kuo Kuana, where both her family as well as herself were as close to royalty as the island nation was likely to ever have, she stood apart, save for a few rare exceptions._

_Being in this camp was something of a proverbial rebirth for her, to step out of the shadows of the quiet, almost timid bookworm that she had been and be something more. She wouldn’t be a figurehead, as her parents had molded her into, she’d be something_ **_more._ **

**_She’d be a fighter_ ** _._

_She wanted to command her peers through strength of character and ideals. She wanted to earn their respect and admiration, she wanted to personally hold the hand of every proverbial brother-in-arms and lead them to a place where they weren’t tolerated, but_ **_accepted._ **

_As the flight of fancy starts to take her, she almost leaves her bunk, but then stops as the tight, familiar grasp of anxiety takes her._

_A sigh somewhere between defeat and relief escapes her then._

_She'll step out of her shell tomorrow…_

_… maybe._

_For the moment, she keeps her eyes flitting around the other new recruits. The faces twinging a level of familiarity in her subconsciousness, but not enough to bring forth the names they’d given her in passing._

_Getting their names to stick to their faces would take time._

_The story lover inside of her though, could near recite the experiences they shared that brought them there. Those were far more important, far more varied, and infinitely more tragic._

_The skunk faunus on her left was a woman who’d had her scent glands forcibly removed by a surgeon after numerous complaints from a neighborhood association forced her to choose between either that invasive and incredibly personal surgery, or to have their lease annulled by the township._

_Any and all queries and stays of motion got held up by red tape or went mysteriously missing, the skunk faunus had tears running down her cheeks as she told the rest of the recruits that the housewife that ran the neighborhood association was also married to one of the elder member of the town council._

_The fact that her landlord refused to re-up her lease a day before deadline and put them in dire straits when it came to finding a new place at the end of that term was just an additional cherry on the_ **_‘fuck you’_ ** _pie._

_The fish faunus to her right had worked diving for salvage off the docks in the Kingdom of Vale with his brother, the two having a go of living the dream running what amounted to their own scrap business._

_He’d told them about the moment his brother had died, stuck in illegal fishing nets set out by commercial fishermen. About how the Kingdom itself levied a mediocre monetary fine against the company of human fishermen, no charges of manslaughter, unlawful practice or even endangerment, the commercial cannery suffered literally no hit to their business or how they operated._

_He recalls the battle lost against the insurance company to get his brother a respectful but expensive burial. The insurance claim citing that since the death was labelled as misadventure, that the onus and responsibility of his brother’s passing lay entirely against his brother._

_Human company, human-led investigation, human injustice._

_It was equal parts tragic and beautiful in a sense, how the careless and ignorant actions of humanity was exactly the driving force that was melding and galvanizing this force._

_It helped to steel her resolve, even as it hollowed out her stomach and left a pit of what could very well be despair there._

_She hears a curse and looks up to see one of the younger recruits walk in, a chameleon faunus if memory served her correctly. Some of the other recruits had called on her to prove her trait due to her near-uncanny ability to pass off as human, and without any reticence or fear, the young girl had held her chin high and proceeded to run through a gamut of colors._

_The chameleon girl looked rather vexed in that moment, trying to ring out her long and oddly styled locks of hair, she looked forlornly between several of their peers before their eyes met, then she let out a sigh and her shoulders slumped._

_“They cut the water to the showers for the night…” Chameleon girl grumbles._

_She doesn’t laugh in response, merely smiles and lets out a prolonged breath from her nose that just_ **_might_ ** _be a chuckle._

_The chameleon faunus must have thought the smile was inviting enough, because she started to make her way over. She couldn’t for the life of her recall the girl’s name, but she definitely remembered her story, even amongst the countless heartbreaks surrounding them, hers in particular had been one of the cruelest stories to hear._

_A youth spent masquerading as a human in Atlas, at the behest of parents that wanted only the best for their daughter right up until the mines had-_

_“LIGHTS OUT IN FIVE MINUTES!” A voice boomed from outside, earning a collection of groans from the various number of recruits and members that hadn’t yet completed the evening’s dalliances._

_The chameleon girl freezes then, the freckles on her face and arms tinged pink in embarrassment as she quirks an eyebrow at her._

_After a prolonged pause, she saves the girl the indecision of whether or not to try and start up a conversation and instead gives her an apologetic shrug before starting to adjust her bedroll for the night._

_Scratching the back of her head, the chameleon girl lets out a faint chuckle “Okay, tomorrow though we’re talking, you’re like the only person around here I haven’t talked to yet!”_

_She nods in response, a soft smile still on her face as the girl in question turns and ventures back to her cot. The sound of various bodies shuffling into their bunks for the night fills the air, the occasional grunt or bidding of a good night bringing a warmth to her stomach that felt faintly of acceptance._

_When the lights go out a few minutes later, she doesn’t bother using her nocturnal vision to continue watching those around her, and instead slips into a fitful sleep._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter for me to simply assert that Blake's flashback scenes are a treat to create. 
> 
> I also like how much wiggle room faunus as a canon species gives me concerning their traits and how an intolerant humanity might and would react to them, well... I guess 'like' is a strong word, it just gives me so many avenues to approach the subject matter at hand.
> 
> Please give constructive criticism, comments and kudos if you like what you're reading thus far.


	6. Hollow Laughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Velvet and Lie Ren have been called and are now doing their best to keep this mysterious cat faunus alive, while Yang, split between helping and her own internal confusion, bares witness.

“Where should we set her down?” Velvet asks as she and Ren brush past me, the amber-eyed faunus lying concerningly still on the stretcher being held between them as I hold the front door of my family’s cabin open for them.

I’ve seen plenty of people laid out awaiting medical aide before, and even as secured by body straps as the dark-haired stranger is, it’s always something of a good sign if there’s at least a twitch or a jerk against them, but in this woman’s state, there’s nothing except the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing to identify her as anything but a corpse.

… the blue lips and pale skin only bolster that grim thought.

“Yang, I asked wh-”

“On the kitchen table, it should be clear” I respond, cutting Velvet off as I snap back to the here and now. I follow the trio into the house, closing the door behind me before making a beeline through to the living room to stoke the fire and get it roaring, the dark-haired faunus was going to need every degree we could get into the cabin shy of just setting the place on fire.

As I throw several logs of dry wood into the embers I can hear the clatter of the stretcher’s frame thudding heavily on the oak kitchen table, followed by Velvet murmuring quiet and concise instructions to Ren. I walk through with intent, already frustrated by how useless I had felt when the duo had come to pick the casualty and me up.

I mean, it is obviously something of a challenge to try and tie a secure knot around an injured, unconscious body in a high-stress environment to begin with, but with a foot-and-a-half long blade jammed through your prosthetic hand? Yeah, I should maybe be somewhat lighter on myself than feeling as useless as I currently do right now.

Still, just because I - and my two very dear friends currently trying to assist me in saving a life - can plainly see why I’m having difficulties, means that my brain will allow me to accept that as an excuse.

_ Stupid chemical imbalance _ .

When I round the corner to the kitchen I see that Velvet is quick at work getting the essentials out, a portable EKG machine is hooked up and beeping rapidly with the amber-eyed woman’s pulse and she’s in the midst of inserting the intake for intravenous saline into the back of the casualty’s hand. Ren meanwhile is quickly unwinding the furs and pelts I’d managed to get around her, looking for any additional injuries and cuts that may have been hidden.

Lie Ren is one of the most earnest, stoic and classy existences the world of Remnant has ever known, so it’s no surprise to me that everything in his eyes and expression is calculating and clinical even as he pulls away the few remaining layers that separated this woman I’d fought mere minutes ago from her modesty.

Even if Ren weren’t the type of man one were proud to know by the strength of his virtues, the tapestry of scars, bruises and poorly healed burns that paints the skin of this dark-haired faunus before us would definitively remove any semblance of sexuality from the occasion in a  _ heartbeat. _

_ “Fuck me runnin’...” _ It takes me a few seconds after the words hit my ears to realize I’m the one who said them. Velvet for her part just sets her mouth into a grim line and continues working to stabilize the woman while Ren turns to the sink and starts running water.

“Yang, have you got any clean cloth and some blankets? Stuff you wouldn’t mind losing?” Ren asks without looking up, “Also any chance you could get the temperature up?”

“Just threw some logs on in the fireplace, it’ll take a few minutes but the house should be warming up momentarily,” I comment, weaving out of the room and up the stairs, to the small linen closet that lay situated between mine and Ruby’s rooms, I open the door and start pulling out quilts and blankets that had fallen into disuse years ago as I call back down stairs, “I’ve got a few electric dust space heaters as well if you think they could help!”

“They certainly couldn’t hurt,” Ren responds simply, taking the bundle of blankets from my arms and setting them off to the side of the kitchen table when I bring them in.

I nod and make my way out to the garage where I’d situated the portable heaters months before, working late into the Autumn season on the skeleton of Bumblebee Two-Point-Oh. They weren’t updated, top-of-the-line Academy quality heaters, but my father had bought them with a keen insight into their reliability.

They may have needed me to replace their Lightning Dust cartridges more often than the newer energy conserving models, but so long as they didn’t break from the occasional bump or drop, Taiyang Xiao Long would stand by their continued use.

I have to unplug and carry in the two heaters separately, my damaged prosthetic turning into a surprisingly big hindrance as I carefully maneuver around my now-crowded kitchen while Velvet and Ren continue to work on the dark-haired faunus, I start the heaters up and direct them towards the injured woman, the kitchen area becoming almost unbearably overheated in a matter of seconds.

I cast a questioning look to Ren to gauge if he was pleased with the heater’s placement and receive a curt nod.

Just like that, I’ve seemingly reached the end of my usefulness in this situation, so I back off and take a seat on the countertop right beside the fridge.

Ren is doing his best to clean and bandage individual cuts across the amber-eyed woman’s body, hands steady and eyes focused, he remains keenly aware of Velvet’s movements and stays out of her way wordlessly as she darts to the more severe injuries the nameless faunus has. It shouldn’t surprise me, the speed with which they worked or the absolute synergy they show, considering the duo have been working together as a medical team ever since the end of the war.

The two had come to Patch at war’s end along with me and several others, just looking for someplace quiet where they could stay far away from everything. The ghosts that pulled at their mind’s from the conflict with Salem haunting them just like my own did. 

Both had lost their partners.

For Velvet, Yatsuhashi Daichi had been the older brother she’d never had, a friendly gentle giant who’d been the lone calming presence on Team CFVY, his loss had taken the seemingly invincible veneer that Velvet and their two other teammates - Coco Adel and Fox Alistair - had worn with such pride and ripped it away. Along with it had went everything else from the team, the bravado, the showmanship, and lastly, the will to carry on their careers as hunters and huntresses without their friend beside them.

For Ren, Nora Valkyrie was something more than family, an actual, tangible link of unquestioning, unmoving love. I was there, right beside Nora when her end had come, swiftly and suddenly and with such starling, dumb fucking  _ chance _ that nothing could have accounted for it. Ren and Nora were everything to each other on such a fundamental level that I, to this very moment, still feel pangs of guilt over my continued showings of self-pity… not that it’s supposed to be a competition, but  _ still. _

The Bullhead that landed on Nora and crushed her instantly only needed to veer a couple meters to the right and Ren would never need to wonder about all the might have beens that his relationship with the ginger-headed woman could have yielded.

He’d never need to wonder about what else he could have had his last words to her be, or think about how many children they could have had.

Yet here I sit, right as rain and begrudging myself for it.

_ This isn’t about me, stop throwing a pity party. _

I give my head a shake before focusing on the duo commencing their  **_hopefully_ ** life saving work. Luckily they’re so into it that they don’t notice my action. Instead Ren’s tying off a tourniquet around the amber-eyed faunus’ left shoulder and cinching it on tight enough to earn a raspy whimper from the unconscious woman, meanwhile Velvet has pulled out several syringes and a shockingly high number of bottles before setting everything down in front of her and beginning to fill each syringe individually, mouth set in a concentrated frown as she measures out the appropriate CCs for the patient before her.

“Lycocoxicilin? We’ve got better antibiotics than that” Ren states, his even voice inflecting ever so slightly at the end, indicating equal parts interest and concern.

“Predator faunus have been known to have reactions to just about everything  _ but  _ Lyco. I’m going to microdose amoxicillin and maybe even some augmentin after an hour if she starts to stabilize, but right now even a light allergic reaction might kill her,” Velvet states simply.

“Reactions in predator-trait faunus are below two-percent” Ren responds and I find myself sucking a breath in through my teeth, anticipating what might actually constitute an argument between two of the most level-headed people I know.

“Even one percent is too high” Velvet shoots back without any bite, just simple, professional dismissal.

Ren for his part shrugs and observes the first round of injections into the unconscious ravenette’s right arm, and it clicks in to me exactly why Ren was offering his opinion even if it wasn’t asked for. He wasn’t doing it to give the rabbit-eared faunus a hard time, he just recognized that she was so focused in on what she was doing that she needed a different angle to at least explore her options.

Not to mention how calming even aggressive banter and discussion could sometimes be in the heat of the moment. I should know, in my academy team, I was the funny one.   
  


It seems so obvious to consider the differences between humans and faunus in a medical sense when so often in Remnant those same differences have driven us apart, almost to the point of causing rifts and crevasses that simply could never be mended time and again, but just about everyone at one point or another had seen or read a news report about a doctor somewhere being taken to court for malpractice because it slipped their minds to consider what might be good for a human male  _ may just in fact _ kill a horse faunus.

The memory of one Marrow Amin yelling at Jaune for trying to poison him via an offered bag of chocolate raisinets  _ does _ still make me smile from time to time though.

I doubt Velvet cared all that much about negative press, she cares about  **_people_ ** , as such even Ren has admitted to me that her attention to detail was why he was content to follow her lead in any emergency on the island of Patch, regardless of the fact that technically, they did their training together post war and on paper were peers.

“What’s with the tourniquet?” I ask, nodding at the band Ren tied on just above the swollen and angry wound on the amber-eyed woman’s arm.

“Going to lance the wound,” The Anima-borne man states simply, “the infection started past the dermal layer so it might already be in the bloodstream. If that’s the case I’m not holding out much hope. If it  _ hasn’t _ reached the bloodstream the tourniquet is just an added precaution”

“You got four hours before a proper tourniquet causes some real damage to a body, right?” The question leaves me and I’ll admit to being mildly impressed that I could recall Beacon’s emergency field medicine course off the top of my head like that, “How’s it getting treated after lancing it?”

“Pretty much going to have to rely on Aura” Velvet sighs as she jams another syringe into the ravenette’s flesh.

I know I’m frowning at that statement “Well and good, Velvs, but this gal doesn’t have any. I wasn’t joking when I said she’s in aura exhaustion. One moment she used some sort of illusion semblance to sneak up behind me and jam THIS-” I raise the prosthetic into view, nodding at the notched and nicked blade still stuck in it, “-fucking thing in me, the next I  _ shattered _ her knee with a downward elbow from a disadvantaged position. Combine that with the malnutrition, dehydration and whatever else is going on, and I’d bet she’s been running hot for way too long”

**_Aura exhaustion_ ** . It was one of those terms that every student was taught, but was rarely talked about afterwards because it was just one of those things that everyone heard about happening to somebody else. It was never something that a trained hunter or huntress - in all our respective training and ego - would ever get.

After all, if you exhausted your Aura in training, training was halted and you were allowed to recuperate,but if your Aura shattered against the Grimm or any number of competent combatants?

You were already fucking dead.

The cat-faunus currently stretched out on my kitchen table was obviously the third option, the one people acted like it couldn’t happen.

_ Overclocking your Aura for survival’s sake. _

It requires some concentration and training, but utilizing Aura in survival situations has been famously noted to have staved off the effects of needing to hold out with no food, no water and no shelter from the elements. There were stories of hunters and huntresses crossing the deserts of Vacuo on foot after their transport had crashed. Days and weeks under the unforgiving sun, in the dry climbs with nothing in sight but the next dune, and because of their control and discipline, they were able to hold out with nothing but their Aura

Aura is a manifestation of the soul. A power that allows for anyone that has their’s unlocked to project, protect and recuperate - and that’s if one was lucky enough to even  _ have a soul strong enough to create Aura _ to begin with. It’s why I was up, fit as a whistle the day after getting launched several hundred meters through the Emerald Forest at top speed during my Beacon initiation. It was the driving energy gauge behind every hunter and huntresses’ Semblance.

Most importantly, Aura could regenerate, and did so quickly if one was smart enough to break away from combat before it’s drain became a problem. To say nothing of the various implements used by law enforcement to suppress the Aura of unlocked criminals and suspects.

In cases of Aura exhaustion? The soul of the person never gets to regenerate or take a break, so great is the Aura users’ need that they constantly ride the line, day-and-night, of allowing the power to run out, stopping only for minutes at a time to allow slight buildups of reserve as the situation allowed.

People survive without Aura… Hell everyone does until it gets unlocked either by an experienced hand or accident - my own having activated alongside my semblance in my youth courtesy of a short fall out of a tall tree - but  **_having_ ** Aura and then draining to that extent yields disturbing results.

Erosion of the Soul; the slow degradation of one’s sense of self was one of the starkest ones I can recall, and it chills my bones even thinking about it after running into Apathy Grimm. The will to live just drains from the user until there’s nothing, no emotion, no hunger, no will to survive, the person just becomes a shell and dies.

The most disturbing side effect of Aura exhaustion was a condition known as Sanus Syndrome, and to put it in layman’s terms, it’s when the soul gives up it’s hold on a person’s Aura entirely. A physical body is capable of healing with the aid of the soul’s power, and often should anyways, with Aura though people become reliant and complacent upon those abilities to see them through, and there’s no negative repercussions because nobody is being pushed into a long term exhaustive state.

With Sanus Syndrome, the body is literally being held together by Aura, and when the body cannot maintain that any more, every surface cut, every pang of hunger suppressed, every bone mended and every grievous wound patched by a person’s Aura in that stage of exhaustion just… falls apart.

There were very few recorded cases, and even fewer of them recorded for posterity - as Doctor Oobleck had so joyously told a class my team and I were attending years ago - but he’d managed to nab a couple slides as an example.

I haven’t found a horror movie scary since, and Ruby to this day will eat even the most deplorable of military-grade rations before she ever considers hunting for game.

There were other, slightly more survivable possibilities of Aura exhaustion, but they ran the gamut between  _ mildly horrible  _ all the way up to  **_please just kill me_ ** . Needless to say, anyone who was taught about the condition often chose to push it from their mind as being nothing but a minute possibility they’d never have to deal with… it was easier than acknowledging the proverbial double-edged sword our key power in the fight to save Remnant actually is.

“-YANG!” Velvet is now staring at me, her exclamation shocking me out of my stupor.

“Sorry, what’d you say?” I respond lamely, feeling my shoulders shirk as I’d obviously zoned clean out of it while the rabbit faunus had been talking.

“I said I’m going to need you and Ren to alternate aura transfer to directly stimulate pushing the infection out. So long as it isn’t already in her blood it should work once we lance it” She turns back to the table, gesturing to the opposite side for me to stand before grabbing another syringe, “I’m just going to give her an Aura suppressant so her soul doesn’t try and stockpile or leech off either of yours. If she lives through the next couple of hours I’m going to need to head back to the practice and grab more. She needs to heal naturally until we can be sure her body’s capable of withstanding usable Aura again”

_ I’d bet good money Oobleck showed that video to Velvet and the rest of team CFVY when they went through that course the year before us too. _

“Shame Jaune isn’t here...” Ren sighs as I walk around to the amber-eyed woman’s side. I can only nod in agreement. The leader of Ren’s long-dissolved team has a natural talent for support, defense and tactics. His reserve of Aura and the nature of his semblance made him a natural fit for emergency medical Aura transfers.

It was how the lovable blond-haired dumbass had managed to save Weiss Schnee’s life, after all.

“We’ll just have to do, Ren,” I try to sound cheerful and assured, but I’m just exhausted enough that it comes out sounding as token as the words actually were. I finally start to take off my jacket, slipping my left arm free before realizing the sleeve of my right just isn’t going to fit over the knife sticking through the palm of my prosthetic, “... little help?”

Ren manages the barest ghost of a smile, moving to help disconnect my prosthetic with practiced care while I hold the jacket firmly in my left hand, not allowing it to slide down and snag the blade and possibly damage the prosthetic further.

_ I still get a painful jolt from the limb’s feedback sensors as it’s disconnected though. _

_ “Fuck!” _

“Apologies” The quiet Anima native offers.

“Not your fault,” I assure him, then toss the jacket onto the counter beside me, “thing’s temperamental at the best of times. I get it’s made for assimilation into everyday civilian life, but compared to Pietro’s prosthetic it’s garbage”

“Any update on that?” Ren asks as we take our positions around the table, his hands calmly yanking open several bandages and gauze wraps while Velvet readies a scalpel to reopen the bullet wound.

“Called Ruby earlier, her and Jaune are basically doing shoreline patrols southeast of Atlas while Penny is getting maintenance done and Weiss is doing that SDC revival thing in Argus. I’m just about ready to call and beg Penny to fly my arm back down when she’s done her checkup,” A chuckle escapes Ren as I whine exaggeratedly, “you called Jaune recently?”

“A few weeks ago,” the dark-haired man offers with a shrug, “I should probably call more often, but half the time when we connect through the CCT he’s just about to roll out on another mission. Now that stuff is…  _ better _ , he looks at the job and title of Huntsman as being a lot of fun. It’s like I’m talking with Ruby about it sometimes”

The laugh I let slip at that is forced and I know for a fact that Ren knows it… I’d bet solid Lien that Velvet does too if she’s paying attention to our idle chatter. All three of us know that the word  _ ‘better’ _ is a loaded one in this case. Hunters and huntresses now lived in a Remnant that held the very real possibility of not needing them anymore, and while the reason for that was undeniably better than the constant threat of mass extinction on a planetary scale…

… the price for buying this new status quo wasn’t cheap.

“Alright, I’m going to be reopening the wound, Yang you’re going to be first up to bat, just transfer the Aura through her, her body should do the rest when it comes to mending and expelling the infection and the suppressant will keep any from building up. Ren, as I cut I need you to act as the runner; bandages, disinfectant, applying a pressure sleeve to try and squeeze any remaining pus out, almost like it’s a staph infection, got it?”

Ren and I nod as she makes sure to maintain eye contact with us the whole time she’s explaining exactly what she wants done. I set my hand on the amber-eyed woman’s shoulder and begin to concentrate, the telltale glow of Aura begins to surround me as I focus and push it into the body before me.   
  


“Remember to concentrate specifically on sending the energy to her left arm, we don’t want her soul syphoning it to repair her knee or any other number of wounds or we’ll be here all night,” Velvet grunts, “no offense, but I doubt the three of us combined have the Aura to fix everything on this lady”

It was too true to sting my ego in any way. In fact before I’d seen Jaune use his own Aura to fix the wounds of other people, I’d never known how effective the technique could be in first aid. 

The trade off being that a person transferring their soul’s power in order to heal a foreign body was a taxing process.

Velvet brings the scalpel to flesh and I look away, I’ve seen a lot of horrible things in my life, Brothers knew everyone in this kitchen - including our mysterious patient napping on my table - has seen more than their fair share as well, but I still find myself with an aversion to witnessing anything brutal or gross if I can help it, and as I can plainly hear Ren stepping in with clean clothes to wipe away the blood and infection draining out of the wounded limb I can plainly say that I’ll stand by that plan every time.

I feel the body jerk under my hands, followed by Velvet’s surprised exclamation and the rare, quiet curse from Ren. I turn my head back to see what’s going on and find myself looking down into unfocused and familiar amber colored eyes.

“Oh f- she’s awake Velvet!” I exclaim, my voice sounding far more shrill with surprise than I ever want it to.

“I noticed! Ren, hold her down by the shoulders so she doesn’t hurt herself… Yang, keep channeling Aura!” The rabbit-eared faunus commands

The amber-eyed woman’s movements are weak, almost feather light, a far cry from the flagrant savagery that had nearly killed me less than an hour ago, and that speaks exactly to how worn down she must be. 

There’s no words, no curses or pleading escaping from her dry and cracked lips. She doesn’t glare or focus on me or the other two surrounding her. She just twitches, jerking against Velvet’s ministrations and both Ren and I’s solid grip on her, the occasional whimper - a pathetic mewl that I’m not above admitting twists at something in my gut - as we try our best to not only  _ not _ hurt her, but help her recover.

She’s plainly terrified, and the fact that she’s in no position to resist us is not helping that fact.

“Shit, she won’t stop twitching…” Velvet growls before literally lifting her leg up onto the table and using it to kneel down on the amber-eyed woman’s wrist in an attempt to immobilize it, beside her the mobile EKG has begun to send out it’s tone at an increasingly rapid pace, “... Ren?”

“On it” The dark-haired man responds, and in seconds I see color vanish from the very being on the table before us as his Aura activates and his semblance sets to work. The power of Tranquility courses through the amber-eyed woman’s body, the twitching and fear seem to just evaporate.

I watch as amber-eyes change from wide and scared, to heavy and lidded, and then slowly drift close as her breath evens out, the beeping of the EKG becoming just as slow and even as the mysterious faunus drifts in to sleep.

“No offense to Coco,” I mutter just above a whisper, though I’m fairly certain the woman we’re trying to help is not going to wake up for a good long while, “but it’s probably a good thing you were on shift with Velvs today”

I’m somewhat disappointed by the lack of a smile or chuckle at that comment, instead he merely gives me a curt nod before slowly releasing his grip on the dark-haired faunus’ shoulders before walking over to help Velvet finish clean and bandage the now seemingly drained arm.

Velvet hasn’t told me to stop pouring my Aura into the Amber-eyed girl, so I continue concentrating on that and try to let everything else around me fade into the background.

Unfortunately, my brain has a hard time with being silent, and I’d long since sobered up from last night’s spirits, so I just stand here, feeling my own aura slowly deplete and eyes attempting to distract my brain by studiously observing the stranger before me.

It hurts to think about the fact that I would simply love to ask Ren to use his semblance on me, if only for a bit, but a potent mix of shame and pride will no doubt keep me from making such a request of him. 

I swallow my want down.

*

“I’ll pay for the call myself,” I state with certainty as Ren, Velvet and myself are in the midst of cleaning the kitchen up, “don’t write up the Vale Council or even dig into the Patch restoration coffers. This one is all on me and I don’t want anyone to kick up a fuss about town funds going towards patching up a hermit”

Ren arches a brow but says nothing as he finishes packing the portable EKG machine into it’s ruggedized carrying case before tucking it into the large ruck it had been packed into, Velvet though takes a moment to lean back against the kitchen counter, nursing a beer that she’d been offered twenty minutes prior after we’d transferred the unconscious amber-eyed faunus girl upstairs to Ruby’s bedroom.

“I doubt the townspeople would mind all that much, Yang. The eldest Birche boy has pretty much told everyone and their extended family about his  _ ‘encounter with a mysterious yeti’ _ ” A chuckle escapes the former team CFVY member.

_ Shit, leave it to the kid’s big mouth to blab to everyone on the island. _

By the looks on Velvet and Ren’s faces, they noticed my expression drop at that realization.

“Did you not want him to tell people about it?” Ren ventures.

“Well, he shouldn’t have because getting townspeople to worry about some unidentified wood-dweller could attract the Grimm to begin with…” I start, but my mind is already several processes ahead, “... but now that I actually found the thing he shot and discovered it’s not an  _ ‘it’ _ , but a female faunus who very,  **_very_ ** much did not want to be found, I have a lot more questions and concerns and…”

_ Who was she? _

_ Why was she here on Patch? _

_ How long has she been here? _

_ What is she hiding from? _

“... I think until we get some answers, we need to keep this quiet and off-the-books” I’m looking at the wall now, my mind trying to piece together a plan on how to approach this unexpected situation. If I had found a new type of Grimm or even a bandit tribe, I’d know how to proceed.

“You suspect she’s something more than just a faunus survivalist” Velvet says it as a statement, voice flat and neutral as I nod in response.

“She’s clearly got training of some sort,” Ren agrees with my assessment, crossing his arms as his head tilts back to stare at the ceiling of the kitchen, above which the amber-eyed woman was currently unconscious in my younger sister’s bed, “good training too, if she managed Aura control that sophisticated for that long, given how sick she is.”

“Then there’s the tactics,” I nod over to where my arm sits on the countertop, right beside my discarded jacket, “she nearly killed me. Had zero hesitation about it either, that speaks to military or even Huntress training. She’d be fearsome to fight on a level playing field, I’d bet good Lien on it, so whatever it is that has her hiding in the backside of nowhere -  _ and this is conjecture, mind you _ \- must be some serious shit”

Silence reigns for a minute after I say that, I have very little doubt that Ren and Velvet’s brains are riding a wavelength similar to mine, theorizing possibilities about the  _ ‘what’ _ and the  _ ‘why’ _ surrounding the mystery woman upstairs.

“Okay, I hate to ask you two this,” I cut through the silence after a moment, “but keep this quiet. If anyone’s curious just say it was a dinner invitation and I needed some help because my prosthetic is acting up. I’ll cut you guys a check for the medical supplies personally”

“The Vale Council would probably cover it Yang” Velvet offers

“I got more Lien in my bank than I know what to do with Velvs,” I offer the rabbit faunus my best winning smile before adding, “besides, Glynda will be  _ insufferable _ if she thinks absolutely anything is going on, let alone some mystery hermit. I’d rather have answers ready for her than deal with her… Glynda-ness…”

The nod I receive in return for that comment is a cross between understanding and grudging acceptance. Velvet and the other members of team CFVY were seen as Glynda Goodwitch’s golden children, a literally perfect team formation that utilized and bolstered strengths while minimizing or destroying their own weaknesses. The fact that they had held Beacon together after the Fall alongside Goodwitch herself for almost a year only bolstered that bond for a time.

The problem was what Goodwitch had turned into following Salem’s defeat.

War made victims of us all, but in the Headmistress of Beacon Academy’s case, it had turned an already severe and headstrong woman of authority into a near nigh-incomprehensibly ambitious…  _ warmonger _ might be too grand a term, but she hovered close from time to time.

In hindsight it seems obvious, that the destruction of Salem takes away the overall goal and mission of Hunter Academies, it should be expected that someone who has devoted their entire life to that goal to suddenly have it taken away and their entire life’s work run the risk of falling into irrelevance might have trouble coping with it.

Glynda didn’t take the revelation well, she still isn’t, and instead has strong armed her way onto the Vale Kingdom Council, while also openly lobbying for the use of her students and graduates to be utilized at every opportunity, as though to prove the worth of everything she ever stood for.

The Glynda Goodwitch that used to command respect based on her concrete tough poise now routinely went out of her way to look for battles to fight.

Keeping her off Patch felt like my primary job some months, it was exhausting and aggravating. The fact that Velvet, Coco and Fox - a trio of people who once held the Headmistress in the highest regard - found her behavior since war’s end to be borderline reprehensible spoke more clearly about the person she’s become far better than I ever could.

Judging from the look on the rabbit faunus’ face, there’s little doubt in my heart that it’s a point that still stabs a little too sharply for her.

“So obviously getting her lifted to Vale medical is out,” Ren cuts through the silence, “glad we put off calling for a Bullhead transport then, but that also means we’re going to have to come up here daily for a couple hours each at least to treat her”

Velvet nods at that summation.

‘

“Probably only one of you is necessary,” I interject, “the town proper still needs  _ a doctor _ around in case of emergencies after all. Even then though, you two are going to be gone more often than not, any simple things I should keep an eye on?”

“Let’s see…” Velvet trails off, wetting her lips with the last of her beer and reminding me that I have a couple bottles of Atlesian vodka in the vegetable crisper of my fridge calling to me… that I won’t respond to until after my friends have left, “she’s going to be out of it. The Aura suppressant I injected her with will last three days, so she’s going to be weak and sore, too much to even move, truth be told, so I doubt she’ll be conscious for long, if she regains consciousness to begin with. The saline solution should rehydrate and nourish her during that recovery, so there’s no need to worry about feeding her right now, but if she complains about feeling thirsty you can moisten her lips but no more than that…”

“Not to be contrarian, but what if she  _ does _ try to get up?” I question, after all if there’s one thing that struck me as being obvious about the currently unconscious faunus currently in dreamland upstairs, it’s that she was stubborn to a near-insane degree.

Velvet shrugs, “Stop her, or put her back in bed if she does. If she’s cognizant enough, let her know that her aura is suppressed and her knee is trashed, we taped it up and all, but I’m going to have to find that one a brace to keep the joints held an appropriate distance apart for when her Aura does come back to all the tendons will connect properly.”

“Oh, okay then…” I can feel my mind start to cycle through possibilities, the  _ ‘what could happens’ _ and the  _ ‘but what-ifs’ _ .

“Yang, relax,” Velvet interjects herself between my racing thoughts, “if there’s an emergency, you call Ren or I, and we come running to do what we’re trained to. We’ll be switching saline bags, we’ll be emptying bedpans, we’ll be administering Aura suppressants and antibiotics, alright? You just need to monitor her state while we’re not here and keep her from burning down the bloody house”

That drags a genuine laugh from me, “My dad said that was the hardest job of being a parent once I’d unlocked my semblance, you know…”

“See, you’re an expert already!” Velvet responds cheerfully.

“Oh yes, because if there’s one thing Yang Xiao Long is known for, it’s putting out fires…” Ren deadpans.

“Hey now!” I protest with fake indignation, dragging a laugh from all of us.

I wish I could say mine felt real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aura exhaustion and Lyco are two examples of things I feel should be addressed in canon some time: The consequence of over reliance on Aura, and the possible differences between medically treating a human and a faunus.
> 
> THAT said, it feels good to get this up, I'm wondering how much season 8 might alter my narrative though I will say I'm glad to see that pretty much every assumption I've made about James Ironwood since Season 2 is pretty on the nose.
> 
> SO I'm on the fence about what the next chapter will be, if I'll be alternating back to Blake or break up the pattern and do a second Yang chapter.
> 
> Glynda isn't the only character I plan on putting a few dents in when it comes to how their character might have evolved from canon, and I endeavor to make their transitions explained and natural as opposed to OOC and against grain, I'm genuinely really excited about how some of them might be received, especially seeing as how one of the least liked characters in the series is going to be given something far, FAR different to do.
> 
> As always constructive criticism, comments and kudos are always welcome! Till the next time I get off my lazy ass and write another chapter!


	7. Where The Flesh Wore Thin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She finds herself trapped in memories she once held back. 
> 
> Here, she witnesses the first time she ever truly suffered at human hands.

She’s floating or weightless, the pains and stresses that have been following her for years fading into nothing. Or maybe she just doesn’t exist at all, at least not anymore.

Is this what death was?

If so, she surmises she could have done a lot worse, feeling her fears and angers drift away. Becoming something so minute and quiet, simply allowing her to just be.

The world around her would be black, were it not for the flashes of light and the squiggles of movement on the edges of her perception, as though she were putting pressure onto her closed eyelids and allowing the diluted phosphenes to flash and color her world in shades that simply didn’t have words for.

The fact that she could see it all did not worry her, though she’d be hard pressed to say why that was.

She might be there for minutes, or an eternity, and it wouldn’t matter, all she knows is that nothing can hurt her right here.

Which is why she feels a pang of disappointment when something starts to drag her  **down** , a conceptual direction when she occupies a space where direction simply doesn’t exist, but she’s being taken  **_somewhere_ ** , and knowing what trials she’s faced before this simple, glorious non-existence floating in the  _ eigengrau  _ that seems to be this bit of non-reality, the very idea that she will not be here momentarily fills her with dread.

She’d gasp if she needed breath.

She’d scream if she could be heard.

She’d claw, fight and struggle if there was anything to grab on to.

There is none of those things, and so she slips further down, the dulled lights, squiggles and perceptual grey being swallowed by something so much darker.

She closes her eyes, tries to will herself back into that peaceful eternity.

When she opens them, she realizes it’s all for naught.

_ She’s eight years old when she experiences the breadth and depth of human cruelty first-hand. Which is not to say she’s a stranger to it, her parents were very public in the media, activists for equality and opportunity for the faunus, but her experiences until this moment were almost like a symptom - a side-effect - of her proximity in regards to her parents. _

_ She’s ridden in vehicles that had been bombarded with rocks, eggs and harsh language as they beat a hasty exit from countless protests. _

_ She’s been short of breath while her head was covered by a thick jacket in sub-tropical level heat, trying to muffle her advanced hearing from the questions and barbs posed to her and her mother by several prominent members of anti-faunus journalism. _

_ She’s been left in the care of near-strangers from her own kind, long past tired but too anxiety-filled to fall asleep as she watches debates live on hotel and safehouse televisions, hoping that this wouldn’t be the time an assassin or human-purist would shoot their shot and make her an orphan. _

_ This very moment, however, is the first time where she’s been under the spotlight, not as part of a greater whole, but as an individual. In a school yard in the middle of Mistral, knees scraped by the rough tarmac surrounding the three story brick building, tears in her amber eyes and fists clenched in anger. _

_ They didn’t shove her to the ground because of who her parents were, nor did they yank her ears or call her an  _ **_animal_ ** _ because she’d been the poster girl for faunus rights since she could hold a picket sign. _

_ They simply hated because she existed, she was  _ **_there._ **

_ “Animals should be in a kennel, not at a school with real people!”  _

_ “Look at her cry!” _

_ “Don’t sit near us in class or I’ll have you put down” _

_ All this and more passed her ears, verbal barbs leaving metaphysical lacerations that would color her worldview for years at a time.  _

_ This hadn’t been what she’d envisioned when she saw shows on the CCT about kids and young adults attending school together. In those spun tales, the hurdles between understanding and friendship existed, to be sure, but they were simple, wrapped up neatly in thirty-minute increments that forged and bonded it’s characters into something so much stronger. _

_ A few words, a trial to overcome, and they’d understand that their differences were so simple, so… pointlessly banal that it was a wonder they existed at all. _

_ None of those after-school specials ever accounted for genuine cruelty. Never made mention of the sparks of pain that would dance across her vision when a boy two years her senior yanked on her feline ears, or of the disgust so palpable that she’d spent a week not eating lunch after a girl that sat behind her would spit in her food. _

_ There wasn’t a single episode that mentioned the absolute indifference of the teachers and adults that she’d been led to understand were supposed to look after students NO MATTER their race, religion or background. Where on-screen the adults were paragons of life, dispensing lessons and understanding in calm and equal measure, the reality was much colder, often punctuated by inconvenienced sighs and grumbling at being asked to do anything -  _ **_anything_ ** _ \- regarding a troubled little girl’s welfare. _

_ School on screen had depicted an adventure she wanted to participate in, a road of learning she yearned to walk after years of being home-schooled by parents and family friends as the movement made their way across the world of Remnant, fighting and seeking acceptance for their people. _

_ School in reality may never have measured up to that silver screened ideal - a warning that her mother had been sure to give her weeks ago as she handed her a backpack stuffed with freshly bought writing supplies and a warm kiss on the cheek - but she never could have anticipated the veritable social prison she found herself locked into for eight hours a day, five days a week. _

_ She feels a yank on her hair and tries to blink back the tears that spring forth to her eyes, tears meant sadness, but here in this place, with these people, she found they only spurred their actions on, brought them some sick level of enjoyment she simply would never be able to understand. _

_ Another wrench of her ebony locks and she growls as the tears slip free, running down alabaster cheeks much to the amusement of her tormentors. _

_ “Did the kitty just growl!?” _

_ She swats at the hand in her locks as they tug for a third time and instead finds herself shoved down back to the tarmac by a booted foot. She curls up quickly, slim arms covering her head and balling into the fetal position with practiced care, she’d learned rather quickly that it was much less painful to be kicked in the back than the stomach or face, though the position simply couldn’t account for a few of the more mean-spirited little monsters that liked to stomp at her ribs. _

_ A lot more than a single pair of feet start the beating proper, seemingly descending without pause or exhaustion from every direction while she can do nothing but clench her eyes shut and try her best to reign in any distressed cries or shouts of pain, she doesn’t wonder where the teachers patrolling the schoolyard are - they’ve never given any interest at stopping the torment before - and instead she just waits for the boredom of her assailants to set in. _

_ It takes an eternity, or a few moments, time seems to skew in this regard. _

_ The kicks stop and she hears the sound of footsteps retreating, off to either find another like her, or maybe even to apply themselves to those genuinely wholesome school activities that she’d watched over the CCT, certainly some of them had to exist, right? _

_ She uncurls slowly, whimpering as she feels the stretching and loosening of taut skin and muscles jostle bruises and aches she knows she’ll be feeling for the next little while, only once she’s straightened out and rolled onto her stomach, hands braced against the ground, does she dare to open her eyes. _

_ Her heart drops at the crooked grin on one of her tormentors, mere inches from her face. Freckles and dimples and curled brown hair that even at the age of eight she’d been quite taken by initially now look cruel and ominous. _

_ He brings his foot back, the trajectory clearly intended for her face and she’s driven to action, not consciously, but by fear and instinct. _

_ The boot comes forward, a promise of violence to be met upon her upturned face but she jerks her head to the side, grunting in paint as it connects with her shoulder but wrapping her arms around the cruel boys’ ankle. The pain doesn’t seem to register as something red and angry and  _ **_hot_ ** _ flushes through her system. _

_ She’s dimly aware of the actions taken next, of turning and biting into the flesh of the boy's leg, just above the rim of leather boot. She doesn’t stop at the boy’s pitched screaming and instead goes harder, until the taste of iron fills her senses and her attacker falls over. _

_ The red swarms her vision as a miasma of voices blend, of the  _ **_noise_ ** _ of all her tormentors jeering and angry against her. _

_ The red only fades when two of the teachers who until this point had been absent or - more likely - had been looking the other way, pull her off the crying and bloodied boy, her fists hurting just as bad as the bruises across her torso and legs, but the sting carrying an air of satisfaction at how she obtained it. _

_ This was the first day she had truly struck back at the hands that reached to hurt her. _

_ The admonishments from the teachers as they drag her inside the school are just as hollow and meaningless as their willingness to protect her within these supposed walls of learning. There hisses and biting remarks punctuated with the occasional slur against her people. _

_ One of them calls her an animal, she responds by calling the woman a word she’d once heard her father’s head of security say at a party when she was supposed to be in bed. _

_ The gasp of shock and the far-harder-than-necessary yank of her hair told her that she’d definitely use the word cunt against someone to devastating effect sometime later in life. _

_ She’s marched into the office and roughly planted into a chair in the waiting area as the school secretary - the only faunus in the school’s employ - and the principal are loudly summoned by the offended teachers. _

_ They tell of how they found her assaulting the freckled boy, of how she hissed profanities unbidden. She tries to make her voice heard, thick as it is and with angry tears streaming down her face at how unfair it all felt, but they keep telling her to be quiet, to shut up, that she’s in so much trouble and that her parents have been called. _

_ The secretary gazes on with sympathy, but remains otherwise silent, no doubt she has her suspicions as to the voracity of these claims against a sobbing eight-year-old girl, but her own position was something of a pittance, a tenuous strand that the humans around her had  _ **_given_ ** _ her, regardless of her merits. _

_ After they call her parents, a hurried discussion in which they refuse to allow either side speak to each other until her parents arrive in person to pick up their aggrieved daughter, the principal thinks to call on several male members of the staff to come down, as though anticipating something to happen. _

_ She’d recently moved on up to reading young adult books, and for some reason the phrase  _ **_‘self-fulfilling prophecy’_ ** _ came to mind. _

_ With all these humans in positions of power so vast beyond her childlike scope, she can only sit there in a concoction of dread and anger, their admonishments, now well past the point of being drivel, take on a new tack when they start to talk about how the boy she defended herself against has parents that could - and likely  _ **_would_ ** _ \- pursue legal recompense from her parents. _

_ She feels the panic rise in her throat, thinking about how her inability to just lay there and take the abuse of bullies might lead to her parents’ work being pushed back. _

_ Had she just hurt her people’s cause by refusing to personally be hurt anymore? _

_ The teachers around her look at her with faces flushed red with equal parts righteous indignation and disgust. She wants to plead her case again, since their recriminations have appeared to hit a lull, but when she opens her mouth the secretary gives her a barely perceptible shake of her head. The lamb faunus’ blue eyes shimmering and wet, much as she imagines hers to look in that very moment. _

**_“This is certainly a lot of big scary adults standing around for one scared and crying child”_ **

_ The voice is booming and powerful, commanding and intimidating in equal measure, and it’s a soothing balm on her clenching heart and racing mind as every person in that office goes rigid and looks to the door where her father stands, frame tall and regal, jaw set and expression impassable as he ducks beneath a door frame only intended to give entrance comfortably to someone not lumbering over the seven-foot-tall mark. _

_ A few of the teachers step back as her father unfurls again, his amber eyes - ones she shared with both him and her mother - scan the scene with a clinical gaze. _

_ There’s a moment of silence where the tension is thick and palpable, several human eyes observing the faunus giant with equal parts awe and derision. She’s not surprised, her father could command a legion of their downtrodden race down hostile streets with nothing but his swords, and countless were the numbers of human detractors that had been frozen under the man’s intense gaze. _

_ “Your daughter was caught assaulting a young boy her age in the schoolyard during recess,” The teacher who’d earlier called her an ‘animal’ begins, having found her voice first and immediately using it to sound haughty and petulant, “that blood around her mouth isn’t hers, we had to yank her off the boy and she proceeded to verbally assault us as we dragged her here” _

_ With her father there, she felt her tongue loosen and her heart embolden, she stands, pointing at the supposed adult with righteous indignation, looking to tell everyone exactly what the teacher had called her, but she gets cut off, dismissed before the maligned pejorative can leave her mouth. _

_ “Aren’t you in enough trouble, missy!?” Her words are cut off and she feels the moment of bravery pass as the principle glares down at her. _

_ “I want to hear her side of this too” Her father’s voice rumbles. His eyes turning to a glare that brooks no room for argument as he makes eye contact with the humans around him, taking a moment to settle on the decidedly uncomfortable looking faunus secretary before turning to his daughter, “go on sweetie” _

_ The words are heavy on her tongue as she tries to explain herself, syllables spilling out between hitched breaths and frustrated snarls. She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to will the urge to burst into tears away now that she is finally being given a chance to speak. She tells the assembled grown-ups about the group of her fellow students that had shoved her down, belittled her, then assaulted her. _

_ About how their words and their fists and their feet hurt her all in equal measure. _

_ “I never saw any such malarkey happening, just you beating on that poor boy!” The teacher snaps. _

_ She can feel her anger returning again, broiling in her stomach, she sends a hostile glare at the teacher that had cut her off,  _ **_this_ ** _ time she isn’t shushed or cut off as she declares that the woman in question had called her an  _ **_animal._ **

_ “Now listen here you little  _ **_liar_ ** _ ,” She feels herself flinch back as the woman takes a step forward, finger pointed at her, “if you think playing some sort of race card is going to circumvent the truth then y-” _

_ “ _ **_I_ ** _ think I expect better from a teacher than to physically intimidate a child,” Her father booms, powerful frame moving with lithe and regal grace to cut the woman’s path from bringing her closer to his daughter, the reaction to this is immediate as several of the male teachers seem to fan out, steps cautious and body language aggressive, “I trust my daughter to tell me the truth, she’s had no reason to lie to me before, and she’s not the one here acting questionably” _

_ “Oh no? Because biting a chunk out of a boy’s leg is just something upstanding people d-” _

_ “What she means to say,” The principal interjects smoothly, her hands held up in a placating manner as she nods to her father, “is that we can’t take anything said as fact, what our trained and experienced teachers saw was  _ **_your_ ** _ daughter savagely beating a boy, and that’s how they proceeded. Now we’ll do an investigation through the Mistral City School Board as to our staff’s use of any racial slur against your daughter, but you have to be aware that the boy’s parents will likely be contacting both you and us, and given that we have  _ **_zero_ ** _ proof that your daughter was retaliating to bullying, we are going to have to side wi-” _

_ Her blood starts pounding in her ears as the principal continues to speak, but her words are drowning out under the steadily pounding thrum in her ears. Her father doesn’t tense or kow, his shoulders don’t drop, she can only make out his expression from his profile but even then she can smell the changes, the nervous sweat and the angry tinge coming off the man who has done his best to raise and protect her through her eight years of life. He’s  _ **_furious_ ** _ , but in this case he’s not the one holding the cards, there’s simply no proof. _

_ She slumps back in her chair, wincing as she jostles the bruises her tormentors had left on her body just little over an hour ago. _

_ The realization hits and she comes to a stand, the chair she’d been seated on scraping across tiled floor and drawing the attention of everyone in the room. Both the teachers and principals look eager to tell her to get back in her seat, but she ignores the gut instinct to follow direction from them as she grabs the hem of her dark longsleeve and pulls it up overhead. _

_ The motion makes her squeak in pain as the fabric brushes over mottled purples and reds, as well as grates over smaller lacerations and abrasions she didn’t know she had. _

_ Still even with the tears in her eyes from the pain and humiliation at the action, there’s a semblance of utter satisfaction as the room seems to have all the air sucked out of it, she raises her eyes to the principal, then trails over to the teacher that had called her an animal, then trails her eyes down to her body. _

_ She’d been hit and kicked and punched before, but never to this extent and it showed, the bruises were so much worse than she thought they would be, some of the marking from various stomps having imprinted the pattern of the sneaker sole on her ribs. It takes a moment for her eyes to truly register just how bad it is before she whimpers and nearly falls over, but her father’s large and strong hands capture her and gently drag her back to the chair she’d leapt out of a moment prior. _

_ She asks even as her father tries as gently as possible to wrench her longsleeve from her shaking hands and drape it back over her how the teachers couldn’t see her, curled up and crying in plain view on the tarmac of the open playground. Her voice is shuddering and tired with stress that someone her age shouldn’t bear on their shoulders, and it weighs down on her, pulling her slowly to the ground. _

_ She feels so heavy. _

_ “You’re going to be okay, kitten” She’s only heard her father’s voice waver like that a few times. Thick with emotion and cracking with dignified outrage. _

_ She doesn’t like it, it hurts her heart. _

_ “Now… we know how this looks Mister Be-” The principal steps forward, hands up in a placating manner. _

**_“No, we are not doing this right now._ ** _ I am taking my daughter home to nurse these injuries and you can expect a call from my lawyers later tonight.” His voice is gruff, losing the restraint by the syllable as she feels his powerful arms close around her. _

_ For the first time since the school day began, she feels relief and safety, the emotional drain taking all the strength from her, she feels her eyes grow heavy, and before she knows it she’s asleep. _

_ When she awoke she would no longer be a student at a Mistral public school, and protestors were marching in the streets, signs held high with an image of her, scared and bruised, a capture taken from a video taken by one faunus secretary and uploaded to a CCT streaming service. _

_ Her mother would also be sitting at the foot of her bed, cheeks stained with tears as she tried to put on a too-fragile smile for her daughter. _

_ “Hey Kitten, how are you feeling?” Her mother asks, shuffling her chair closer. _

_ She grunts out as she sits up, taking note of the bandages that were now covering all the little nicks and scrapes. Tells her mother she’s sore past dried and cracked lips and a throat raw from the days’ trials. The entire room smells of ointment and she feels uncomfortably sticky, no doubt the topical creams from her native Menagerie having been smeared on her bruises as she slept. _

_ She asks where her father is, worry managing to paint her tone even through her exhausted state. _

_ “On the phone with lawyers and the local faunus leaders,” Her mother returns, reaching out to cup her cheek, the warmth and affection is so welcome she can’t help but lean into it, “you were very brave today, sweetheart. So,  _ **_so_ ** _ brave…” _

_ Her mother seems taken aback when she asks about school, wondering about how what happened would affect her grades. _

_ Her mother laughs, but it’s strained and tinged with an uncharacteristic bitterness, “Oh no, the school has a lot more to worry about now than you… and you will  _ **_never_ ** _ be going back there sweety” _

_ She takes a moment to process that statement and how it makes her feel and - oddly - it is neither good nor bad, rather a fusion of both. On one hand there’s the relief that she won’t be shoved down by people she once hoped would be her friends, made fun of and hurt for nothing more than small genetic differences. On the other hand… _

_ Looking down at her bruised knuckles, the moisture in her eyes blurs any hard lines and details and she feels something tighten in her chest anew. _

_ Apologies leave her lips, about how she simply couldn’t sit there and suffer at school, about how she’s sorry if this makes the faunus movement look bad, about how she couldn’t just simply fit in and make it work with all of these new kids. _

_ Any other time she might have let out a yelp or a grunt of pain when her mother’s arms wrap her bruised frame up too tight and pull her into a crushing hug. _

_ “Don’t you  _ **_dare_ ** _ apologize, kitten, not for this,” Her mother’s fingers card through her dark hair, for some reason her left arm is beginning to burn painfully, she pushes the burning away and instead leans into the affection, sniffling, “if anyone should be sorry, it’s your father and I, we knew that you’d face some difficulties in school, but we didn’t realize how bad it would be, just…  _ **_dust_ ** _ … has anything like this happened before?” _

_ It has, and part of her could catalogue almost all of them part and parcel with relatively accurate dates and times. Getting tripped on her way into History Class, having her lunch upended into the garbage much to a large portion of her classmate’s amusement, being pelted by everyone during dodgeball… _

_ … she holds it in though, a burden she can carry alone for now, because right now her mother is hurting so,  _ **_so bad_ ** _ from just the little bit she does know. _

_ Instead she just nods… and shakes her left arm, that burning sensation is getting worse, she bites her lips and pushes it back. _

_ “I know you wanted to make it work, kitten. So bad that it almost hurt, but listen to me…” She finds herself at arms length from her mother, whose face seems to be warping, her eyes shifting and twisting even as her voice continues to ring out in comforting, familiar tones… is it her grip on her left arm that’s causing the burning?  _

_ “... if you ever find yourself in a situation CLose To aS bAD as TodAY, You’Ve GOt t-” _

_ She squeezes her eyes shut as the burning in her left arm grows and grows, her mother’s face before she shuts her eyes to it is a swirling vortex an- _

**“Oh f- she’s awake Velvet!”**

She doesn’t know when she’s opened her eyes, but everything is currently in lines and colors that are too sharp and defined, aided by the burning pain coursing through her left arm. 

Her head and body feel too heavy and sluggish, too tired and worn, to make even small movements and struggles. Rolling her head even slightly seems to take an exorbitant amount of effort, but given that there are three strange faces hovering in her view, she tries anyways, panic and bile rising in her throat as she tries to look around for something -  _ anything _ \- to break her free from this situation.

Her eyes dart to her arm which is throbbing in agony and she’s distressed to see a brown-haired rabbit faunus holding her bicep, a sharp scalpel in hand as she digs into her flesh.

**_The sight inspires a harder struggle._ **

“I noticed! Ren, hold her down by the shoulders so she doesn’t hurt herself… Yang, keep channeling Aura!” The faunus yells and she can hear her pulse start to rocket in response, even as the words and syllables seem to distort and twist with the spike of adrenaline that shoots through her.

Her arm burns so bad.

Why did someone need to channel their aura?

Were these people going to kill her? Do something worse? Even sell her back… to  **_Him_ ** ? She tries to cry out, tries to yell for help or beg them for mercy but it’s like her mouth has forgotten how to form the words. Her tongue is thick and sticky and her eyes are wet and nothing makes sense and she just wants to get away,  _ get away, _ **_get away…_ **

At that point there’s a familiar face above hers, with blonde hair and lilac eyes. She’s staring into her eyes intently, mouth set in a straight line and the suddenly unreal level of detail the pain and adrenaline is coursing through her body causes time to slow. 

She notices the laugh line at the corner of the blonde’s eyes and lips, the light dusting of freckles that smatter her nose and cheeks, and the way her hair shines even brighter than the lights overhead.

Something is missing from the lilac-eyed stranger, something that was there earlier, during the chase and the fight, but her mind is fuzzy. Something is different and  _ missing _ and  **_wrong._ **

She keeps struggling.

“Shit, she won’t stop twitching…” The rabbit faunus shuffles and suddenly her wrist is pinned down by a great weight. She wants to howl in protest, and finds herself even more distressed when it comes out as a whimper.

The burning in her arm is so great she feels like it’s being melted off, and she’s reminded of something she saw once, involving white phosphorus and a bandit tribe.

The thought does not soothe her.

“... Ren?”

“On it” The third voice, the one that had belonged to the third person, one who she hadn’t been focusing on, calls out in an almost bored, placid tone before she feels the pressure of the gentle hands on either of her shoulder pulses.

It’s a rapid effect, feeling everything start to drift away in quick effect.

She can feel her own pulse slow and ebb into a calm and steady rhythm, can feel her own fractured mind, so used to the rigors of her terror and anxiety lid, bottle and store them away into a mental compartment that she never knew existed in her still. The fear drains away, then the fight…

… then as the world seems to fade to undersaturated tones and grey, she locks eyes with those familiar lilac irises, and then consciousness slips away.

Moments later, she finds herself floating in black nothingness. Peaceful and beautiful and… eternal?

Was this what death feels like?

  
_ An eternity and a heartbeat later, she feels herself being dragged down, down,  _ **_down..._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, heavy right?
> 
> There's a lot of personal stuff tied into this chapter in regards to my own dealings with teachers and adults in authority and how they can just... fail the kids they're supposed to look out for, and for a kid that hasn't learned how to quite deal or communicate properly with those around them, it can be well and truly devastating to not get that consideration.
> 
> Anyways, this chapter was supposed to have another scene to it, but with Blake out of commish as she recovers I held off to give certain ideas more room to grow during these flashback chapters.
> 
> Up next, Yang tries to adjust to the idea of someone relying on her again for the first time in years, and how her worst habits need to be fought against to make that a reality.
> 
> As always, kudos, comments and constructive criticism give me life and will always be appreciated.


	8. A Loose Grip on a Stark Reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A clear and level head has never fit Yang well, but when Lie Ren makes it apparent just how hard this mysterious cat faunus may need to depend on her, it occurs to her that she might need to make some changes

My name roughly translates into the phrase  **_Sunny Little Dragon_ ** .

The irony is not lost on me as I’ve spent the last hour in bed, nursing a hangover and trying my damndest to keep my head from falling into the direct beam of sunlight that seems to be following me across the  _ Dust-damned _ mattress, defying every measure I’ve taken to nail up blackout curtains in my room to avoid just this very thing.

I guess the joke’s on me since I put those curtains up years ago half-cut on several bottles of cabernet Coco gifted me and have just been too busy or lazy to fix them properly since.

The glare of the light hits my face anew, burning through the inferior barrier that is my closed eyelids, and even though I know it’s well past breakfast time and someone from the village - I forget if it’s Ren or Velvs today - was likely on their way, I grumble out a list of expletives that would scandalize the average bandit tribe and roll over one more time to get the ray of sun out of my face…

… and promptly hit the hardwood floor beside my bed in a heap.

“Fucking…  _ fuck!” _ Real scathing, me. Really stretching that world class Beacon Academy education.

I feel my anger spiking and I bolt back up to my feet, the wave of anger flushing through my body and burning through the headache and nausea of my alcoholic toll as I grip the frame of my bed with my left hand and get to hear and feel the quality oak of the frame crack and splinter under my grip.

I know for a fact that this will mean I have to go into town and order a new bed frame made,  **and** that it won’t make me feel better considering my semblance of fiery anger has never - not once - kept a hangover from coming back after a half-drunken tantrum. I know that these displays of anger might not be for anyone else to see but me, tucked away alone on my little corner of Patch, where they can’t hurt, concern or dishearten anyone.

I know all of this, and right now I simply don’t give a shit. There’s a thread of satisfaction that comes with occasionally blowing my top that feels so very much like  **_catharsis._ **

Besides, whipping my bed through the fucking wall would actually give me something to do, patching a hole in a house sounds like the kind of busywork that will definitely keep my hands…  _ hand _ busy.

Aided by my aura and the activation of my semblance, the frame comes off the ground in my one-handed grip like it’s weightless. A part of me wishes that I had the room to spin or turn with the large piece of furniture to build some proper momentum to toss it, to smash it and get that brief flash of satisfaction with destruction, but I can make due with this.

It wasn’t often I caved to my anger anymore, maybe I’m just well overdue.

_ I blink and see myself staring down into amber eyes. _ ..

It’s the growl that leaves my throat, roughened by sleep and the burn of last night’s scotch that seems to snap me into remembering and I pause, my semblance fading and draining off into nothing, a few seconds go by as the weight of the bed announces itself like it showed up late to acknowledge the laws of Remnant’s physics before I set the bed back down with a heavy thump on the hardwood floor.

Breathe in…  _ one, two, three, four…  _ **hold, then breathe out** …  _ one, two, three, four… _

Blowing my top was all well and good, well, not really, but it was at least permissible as long as nobody was there to be affected by it, and there was the caveat. I had a house guest now, and though she hadn’t stirred since having her infection lanced three days ago, it doesn’t take someone smarter than me to figure out that a queen-size oak bed frame making a mad dash to freedom via the hole it punched in the wall would be an off-putting wake up call.

So instead I turn my focus to some sort of morning routine. Step one, hydration, solved easily enough by the plethora of half-finished plastic bottles of water scattered amongst my room. Drunk Yang always has enough wherewithal to at least  _ try _ and soften the blow of a heavy night’s drinking, yet for some reason I never seem to go far enough until I’m back in the same situation.

I am fully aware that it's an  _ ‘easy’ _ thing to fix.

Next step is a morning’s workout before a shower and breakfast… err,  _ lunch. _

One of the few things in my life that has never changed and  _ never left me _ is my enjoyment of a good workout. Often it was easily the highlight of my day, putting my body through its paces, sweating out yesterday’s worries - even if only for a moment - and letting the endorphins and high take control.

I also won’t say I don’t enjoy the fringe benefit of being satisfied by the continued growth and maintenance of my physique. Even being down an actual flesh-and--blood arm to flex hasn’t taken out the only remaining pride I have left in seeing my musculature swell in the mirror as I hoist weights around the garage.

A quick search through my drawers unfortunately reveals that I’ve been putting off laundry day for far too long, and I quickly find myself kneeling in the pile of clothes vaguely thrown in the direction of my overflowing laundry hamper, smell testing several pairs of board shorts and sports bras, hoping against hope that maybe some of them just got thrown there prematurely by accident.

I make it about a minute before deciding  _ ‘fuck it’ _ and throwing on pre-dirtied clothes and leaving my room. Weiss would be horrified to know I was wearing unwashed laundry that had been decorating my floor for about two weeks, and I have an itch on my left buttcheek that I’m reasonably certain is my own mind conspiring with my traitorous skin to rebel over the same hang up as my best friend, but there’s simply no damned way I’m missing out on the highlight of my day in favor of doing laundry.

I’ll be a swamp hag this morning, and clean my clothes this evening. Then reward myself with whatever might be cooling in the back of the fridge. I  _ should _ still have some of that apple moonshine I snagged from Fox a couple weeks ago.

I think.

The door to Ruby’s bedroom catches my attention as I make my way out into the upstairs hallway. I step up against the entrance and take a moment to listen closely for any oddities, cursing,  _ movement. _

Instead, all I hear are the sounds that are quickly becoming more familiar over the past several days, the hiss of the oxygen supply pumping steadily, the light beep of the portable EKG, and the sound of light snores.

I grab the handle and twist, cracking the door open ever so slightly to peer in.

The view is just as familiar as the sounds. The amber-eyed girl is still down for the count, the two-pronged weight of medical anesthetic and severe physical trauma simply robbing her body of it’s will to stir in even the slightest. She was still in the same position Velvet had left her in after yesterday’s visit, when she’d elected my help to clean the strange faunus’ sleeping form and…  _ ugh _ , swap her bedpan. It didn’t look like the amber-eyed woman’s situation was going to change soon while she recovered and healed, the only thing that did happen on the rare occasion was the odd whimper or distressed whine, the woman’s dried and cracked lips keening out every once in a while between rasps of air, caught in nightmares I wouldn’t be able to wake her from while the heart monitor picked up it’s cadence in time with whatever specters haunted her rest.

Though they tended to pass by quickly, and the amber-eyed faunus would fall back into her more normal, rhythmic pattern, I often found myself clutching my scroll for several minutes after being privy to them, debating whether or not to call Velvs and Ren.

So far, I’ve managed to avoid calling them prematurely.

Yang Xiao Long, paragon of discipline and restraint.

There’s a pang of sympathy that runs through me as I spend far longer than I actually need to staring at the oddly serene sleeping visage of someone that tried to actually kill me three days ago, it’s the pang is aided by… I wouldn’t say nostalgia - as that would imply the thought is wistful - but I guess just remembrance.

It was years ago yet it felt like yesterday, when I woke up from a long sleep to discover that my entire world had been changed, at the cost of my arm, my heart, and the fall of Beacon.

I give my head a shake, trying to dispel slipping into that worn memory.

Regardless, I’d spent roughly a week unconscious before waking to find my right arm had seceded from my body, and I remember discovering all the other little struggles they never mention where it concerns waking up from a mild coma, medically induced or not.

All the books, shows and movies never talk about how your body simply fails you when suffering from only a few days of remaining almost completely inert. Of how your entire skeleton seems to weigh heavy under your own skin, or how your joints and tendons creak and pop with even the most minor of voluntary movement.

They don’t mention how your head and neck feel like they’re in a Dust-damned  _ vice _ , when you come-to on one of those awful hospital pillows. Or the headache and stuffed sinuses that cloy and almost choke you when you try to swallow and get some saliva working around your mouth again.

_ Yeah, this cat-faunus was in for some suffering when she woke up. _

I give my head another shake before closing the door, doing my best to do it softly before wandering downstairs, I grab my scroll off the kitchen island and check for any messages as I venture out to the garage, flipping on some music - a now-retro dance mix that reminds me of all the good times I used to have getting into brawls at Junior’s club - I set the device down on a nearby tool box before walking over to the makeshift squat rack my father and I had built long ago.

The garage was also impressively large considering the simplicity of the rest of the two-story cabin my family lived in. Even with my Bumblebee  _ two-point-oh _ project taking up more than its fair share of space, the same garage still not only half the gym, but also  _ Zippy _ , the car that dad had taught me to drive in, and would have taught Ruby as well were my baby sis not an absolute menace when in control of anything larger than an R/C car.

Like many things in my life, Zippy wasn’t there anymore. Without her owner around, I’d seen fit to sell her at a pittance to one of the local teenagers in town who just wanted a car to give them some semblance of independence.

I was sad to see it go, but honestly, if it could bring someone else a modicum of happiness as opposed to sitting in disuse next to the Xiao Long-Rose home gym, rusting and decaying, then I was all for it.

Also, not gonna lie, watching the smile on that teen girl’s face as she and her sisters piled into it after forking over two-hundred Lien was pretty damned awesome.

I know, I’m being sappy.

Today was a leg day. Actually that was a lie, today was supposed to be a back and biceps day, but because I was a bit too preoccupied - as well as a touch too nervous - about pulling the amber-eyed faunus’ makeshift weapon out of the hand of my loaner prosthetic I found myself altering my normal routine rather than run the risk of having that awkwardly lopsided development one could sometimes spot on my fellow bionic limb recipients.

I mean, just because I can now look in the mirror and not want to scream when looking at where my own flesh and blood  **_wasn’t_ ** didn’t mean I was immune to… I guess my own crumbled sense of  _ vanity _ .

Weiss uses the term  **_dysmorphia_ ** for it, and while I had to look the textbook definition up, I’ll be damned if Snow Queen wasn’t dead on the money.

I was supposed to look whole and  _ feel _ whole, having to wave around a synthetic limb or - y’know - nothing at all just felt wrong to me, wrong like seeing a gym rat who skips leg day, or in this case, wrong like seeing a version of me with lopsided shoulder development just because I was too stubborn to break from my normal routine.

Everything becomes a quick blur of familiarity. I do a quick round of calisthenics to get the blood flowing, followed by a series of dynamic stretches to loosen up. Somewhere in the midst of this I start to feel heat start to build up within me, beads of sweat beginning to form on my temples and in the small of my back.

Some people are always thrown off by how little activity it takes to have me burning up physically, as though my semblance and very being wasn’t centered around the very literal definition of  _ ‘running hot’ _ . I know for a fact by the time I’m halfway through my workout proper I’ll most likely resemble a half-drowned dog, so I make sure to open the garage door and let the cool winter air in to soothe already burning skin.

Seemingly on automatic I’ve managed to secure plates to either side of the bar and secured them with locks. Not even relatively close to the heaviest weight I’ve ever squatted with, but I’m going to be going for rep numbers anyways.

I drape a towel over my shoulders and neck to give a mild barrier between my skin and the metal before pushing up, being sure to balance the load across my shoulders, I use my left hand to loosely hold onto the bar for small corrections before setting off on my first set.

Between the familiar music playing off my scroll and the familiar motions of my workout, I figure I’m a good thirty minutes into my routine by the time I hear the telltale rumble of a snow machine cutting through the natural peace and quiet of Patch’s usually undisturbed wilderness. A minute later I spot it emerge from the treeline, it seems like today’s visitor is going to be Ren, as even from this distance I can spot that the rider is a good deal taller than Velvet… and also the fact that Lie Ren drove like a pensioner with nowhere of import to be.

He drifts the machine to an easy stop just outside the garage door before removing his helmet and letting his dark hair spill free. He gives me a quick nod that I return before setting about pulling out his medical bag and a few additional articles from the storage bin of his machine. 

Likewise, I finish my fifth set of weighted lunges before carefully resting the bar back on it’s hooks.

“Hey Ren, bring me anything?” I call as cheerfully as I can fake while rotating my neck, trying to dispel the mild knots of muscle that always occurred during my weight routine.

“The joy of my company,” The Mistralian man responds dryly, managing to nudge his storage bin shut with an elbow despite his overloaded arms. He walks smoothly into the garage and - showcasing his nearly  _ trademark _ level of good manners - manages to stomp the majority of snow from his boots before daring to venture any further into my makeshift gym space, “how’s our patient today?”

“Out like a light still. I thought the inducement was only supposed to last three days?” I try to sound conversational and passive, but there’s an undercurrent of concern hidden in my question. I should probably keep it to myself, after all, I’m not the doctor here.

“The inducement was three days,” Ren shrugs, his startlingly bright pink irises searching my face with something akin to curiosity, “but given the extent of the patient’s injuries and exhaustion, it might be several more days before she’s rested enough to even consider consciousness. Also, you are… stone-cold sober today”

It isn’t a question, it’s an honest observation. One that is made with such genuine approval and surprise that I’m somewhat debating picking up the weighted bar and depositing it on Ren’s head.

Instead I give my head a shake.

“Mild hangover, it's mostly been sweated out now” It’s  _ definitely _ not a response born of a healthy coping mechanism, but the great thing about Ren is that on almost every level he gets it, why I drink, why I’m trying to drown  _ those _ feelings.

“Yang, normally you smell like a brewery fire at this point in the day,” Another by-product of hanging out with Ren now that Nora was gone was the realization that conversationally, the man had all the subtlety of a  _ cudgel to the skull _ , “you’ve been cutting back these last few days”

“Well yeah,” I respond, obviously on my back foot, “I can’t do sleeping beauty a whole lot of good if I’m too shitfaced to hear her heart monitor flatline or something!”

Ren looks away a moment, a thoughtful expression crossing his face that honestly looks an awful lot like scheming. Unfortunately for the Mistralian man, Nora used to conduct all the schemes in their relationship, which left him with the same penchant for deviousness and subterfuge as Reese Chloris on sodium pentathol.

“Ren, if you and Velvs are considering putting the cat faunus in an extended coma to get me sober, I’ll savagely beat you to death with a barbell right now” 

“Now what kind of doctor would I be to forego my oath like that?” The smile that crosses his face is dull, muted and fleeting, to the point where I’d wonder if I’d seen it at all if I didn’t know the man half as well as I did, “Still, can I at least ask that you  _ try _ to keep cutting back, even after your houseguest wakes up?”

I hate it when Ren asks for stuff, mainly because it causes emotions to flare in me… namely guilt. He’s got an ability to smash through the walls I like to place around myself that not even Ruby with her damned puppy dog eyes has… possibly because Ren only asks for stuff when he absolutely thinks it needs to be asked, whereas my sister will break out the waterworks for a fucking cookie.

“I can only say I’ll try, Ren” I cede, like the weak bitch that I am.

“More than good enough” The Mistralian nods, the smirk that ghosts across his face far warmer than his earlier one.

I walk over to the garage door and shut it against the elements before grabbing some of the stuff burdening Ren’s arms and leading him inside the house proper, my workout put on hold. After all, I can always go back to it when the company leaves, it’s not like I had much else to do today.

“So any changes or developments with the patient?” Ren asks before depositing a bag on the kitchen table, his gaze darting around the room and coming to a notable pause on the discarded prosthetic still laying on the countertop I’d tossed it on days ago.

“With the exception of the odd vocal dream or nightmare? No” I state, doing my best to avoid eye contact when he pointedly glances back to me as though I owe him an explanation for why I haven’t done anything to repair or reattach the loaner limb.

“Vocal? Learn anything useful? A name perhaps?” He starts up the stairs then, seemingly content to let the subject of me walking around half-armed go for now. I follow him up to the room and push passed to open the door, just in case our guest had woken up and wanted some semblance of modesty before some random male ventured in.

Nope, she’s still just as unconscious as before.

“Yes, no, and no again. She doesn’t really use words, it’s mostly just the odd growl or cry. Part of me thinks it’s fortunate she’s literally too beat up to move or she might have very well gone berserk during one of her night terrors” I state honestly.

Ren sets to work with the quiet, focused professionalism he was known for. Checking vitals, noting them down, switching out saline solutions, injecting several medications and a booster Aura suppressant, before moving on to give the unconscious woman a quick clean with a soapy cloth. He - of course - hands off the bed pan for me to clean… so yeah, ew.

I return with the freshly cleaned pan, sliding it back under the faunus’ unconscious form while Ren lightly and carefully rolls her body up to do so.

“So…” Ren starts, tone a sort of manufactured attempt at casual. I’ve heard a similar tone before, and it never, ever preceded good news, “... Velvet was mentioning last night that there’s a possibility that this woman was in the wild too long”

“Too long?” I cast a more critical look over the amber-eyed woman as we set her back down on the mattress, she looked rough, to be sure it was expected from someone in that situation, but even a few days’ rest, hydration and medicine had already made a visible difference in the strange faunus’ appearance, “Unless you and Velvs are hiding the fact she’s got a bomb or something stuffed somewhere unmentionable, I’d say she’s gonna make it”

I get a snort of laughter from Ren at that comment, but the amusement drops and fades so quickly it might as well have not been there. Instead he looks down at the cat faunus with a concerning mix of sympathy and reticence.

“She’s going to live,” the Mistralian affirms with a nod, “but when Velvet says too long, she’s talking about… well, have you ever heard of  _ Faunus Reversion Syndrome _ ?”

I don’t even need to shake my head to plainly make it apparent that I have zero clue what that combination of words mean. The dark-haired man sighs before carding a hand through his hair.

“I spent a couple hours reading up on it last night after Velvet mentioned it last night and essentially, it’s the rare phenomena of a faunus regressing as a person into a more raw, animalistic state,” Ren shrugs, his serious gaze turning to mine, “...  _ ‘turning feral’ _ is what faunus slave owners called it back in the day, when they worked them so hard and so callously they basically lost the human part of themselves.”

I can feel my jaw clenching at just the thought, much as it did during Professor Oobleck’s history classes when the topic of the first Faunus War and the Mistrali Social Revolution had been on the syllabus, a potent combination of disgust, shame and guilt spiking within me at the very concept of how cruel my species could be over inconsequential differences between us and the faunus. 

More than the injustices that I was simply powerless to stop from decades before I was born though, the idea that this woman laid out on the bed had been put in a position to succumb to something like this…  _ Reversion Syndrome _ twisted something in my stomach.

“So, what happens if she’s feral?” My tone is flat, carefully a practiced neutrality.

“Well, firstly we’d need to gauge the severity of it, apparently there’s a spectrum,” Ren crosses his arms as he leans back against the wall, in between a Signal Academy pennant and a poster of the Achieve Men my sister had stolen from me back in our early teens, “most mild cases rarely ever get found or reported, but the faunus that have mild cases are often just viewed as free spirits, maybe a little wild. Nothing severe. As you go down the list and the further the faunus subject degrades, the symptoms become much more… pronounced. Struggling to communicate verbally, trouble understanding social graces and difficulty not obeying an evolutionary hierarchy are all common, but there’s still the possibility of living a full life despite those difficulties”

I can’t say I fully get the extent of those symptoms, but I think I get enough to know it’d be a rough time, especially if this woman looked to re enter society when she recovers. 

“Okay, what if it’s a severe case?”

“If it’s severe Faunus Reversion System, then we’re going to have to get into contact with professionals from Menagerie, because you’re essentially going to be dealing with an Ursa that has opposable thumbs…” There’s no humor in his voice at that statement, he’s being dead serious, even by Lie Ren standards, “they’re totally wild, can snap and attack anyone or anything they perceive as a threat or a mild inconvenience on a dime. I did a quick search on options to care for severe cases, and there were three results, but Menagerie has a support center and system in place, the other two places are essentially looking to conduct studies and are run out of Ma-”

“The other two places can get  _ fucked _ if that’s what it comes down to...” I do nothing to mask my disgust at even entertaining the thought, and from the grimace on Ren’s face it’s plainly obvious he agrees. Neither of us able to seriously stomach the thought of turning a person - feral or not - into a guinea pig for so-called ‘intellectual’ types to write some bullshit thesis on the faunus.

“I figured as much” The Mistrali man nods, walking past me he gives my shoulder a comforting squeeze before exiting the room. I take a moment longer, looking down at the calm, expressionless visage of the unconscious amber-eyed woman before turning and following him out.

We find ourselves back in the kitchen, Ren situating his pack on the kitchen table and repacking everything for the trip back to the village of Patch proper.

“Drink?” I ask, brushing passed him to get to my fridge.

“Water, please” He grunts as he zips the pack shut behind me, I immediately sense his eyes on me as I pull his bottle of water out, watching to see if I go for the same thing or grab something harder. 

_ Dammit Ren… _

I grab a second bottle of water for myself and stand, bumping the fridge shut with my hip before turning and holding the bottles out with my one hand so he can grab one. To my surprise he grabs both and twists the caps off before handing one back to me.

Chivalrous, meddling, beautiful prick.

“Couldn’t help but notice you needed a hand” He states with an arched brow, nodding over to where that awful loaner prosthetic lay, a foot-and-a-half long blade still sticking through the palm of it.

“Ha… bite me, Renny” The slight snort my comment draws trails off in the quiet room, stupid awkward silence, stupid Lie Ren being a good friend and forcing me to address things I was too lazy to.

_ Stupid water hydrating me and having the gall to not be filled with mind-clouding alcohol. _

“I should probably take that knife outta my arm and see if it still at least sort of works, shouldn’t I?” It’s not a question really, and instead escapes me with a tired sigh.

“I wasn’t going to leave until you did” Ren nods, before calmly retrieving the prosthetic and walking over to me.

The damn thing didn’t have the comforting weight and ruggedness of my combat arm, nor did it exude the personal flare of color and design that was distinctly my own, something that made it my own. Instead the metal of the prosthetic was covered with a rubberized coating, color-matched to my natural skin tone, but without the natural fluidity to keep it from not appearing like some bizarre creation outside of the uncanny valley.

I adore Penny, really I do, but it kind of reminded me of how her first iteration would move stiffly and unnaturally, before I found out she was… well, technically an  _ unnatural _ being.

“You hold it steady while I try and pull it straight out so I won’t damage anything else, Got it?” Ren instructs, setting the arm on the table before us, the hand and by extension the blade of the prosthetic hanging over the edge limply. 

I simply nod and set my water bottle down before pinning the arm down on the table with my left hand.

It takes a few minutes, and Brothers help me I’ll never figure out how a weapon that punched a clean hole straight through the hand of the prosthetic managed to snag several internal mechanisms and get stuck no less than six times while trying to be extracted from said prosthetic, but we somehow manage to do just that.

Plus side, I got to hear the unflappable Lie Ren swear.  **_Twice._ **

“How’s it looking?” I query as the Mistralian man takes the prosthetic in hand, observing the big fuck-off hole punched through the palm of it as though he knows what he’s looking at.

“Looks… like a hole,” Ren finishes lamely with a shrug, “Won’t know it it still works til we reattach it, but look at the pinky and ring finger…”

I do, and immediately break out laughing. The last two digits on this supposed technological marvel didn’t curve in a natural resting arc like the rest of the fingers, instead shooting out shock stiff, almost positively shorted out during the extraction of the amber-eyed girl’s weapon.

“Best this prosthetic has ever looked,” I chirp cheerily, “alright, I’m going to stick this thing on ol’ stumpy, just like… be prepared to yank it off of me and shove a wallet in my mouth so I don’t bite through my tongue if the haptic feedback routine is absolutely fucked, alright?”

“I don’t know, I bet Lisa Lavender would pay good money for scroll footage of you having a seizure in your kitchen” Ren deadpans, visibly bracing to help me if such a situation were to happen.

I don’t bother with a countdown or any meaningful build up to reattaching the limb, it either works, or it doesn’t and it hurts like hell for a few minutes, either way I slip it over the anchor point then give a practiced familiar twist to lock it in place.

“ **_Fuck!_ ** ” I growl, startling Ren badly enough that he starts forward to help me yank the damn thing off, but I hold up my actual flesh-and-blood hand to stop him, “Feedback jolt, this arm sucked before, but with whatever damage the things got it’s just a little sharper than it used to be, is all”

“A glowing endorsement of Atlesian technology, to be sure,” Ren drones before nodding seriously to me, “does it work though? Please tell me it does, you look really awkward working out with only one arm.”

“Where was all this sass during our Beacon days, Ren?” I pout before moving the reattached prosthetic around. Much like I suspected a few minutes ago, the pinky and ring finger stay stiff and completely unresponsive, even in spite of my ability to perceive moving them… it’s a disconcerting feeling, reminds me of the phantom limb I had for years after losing my arm.

Okay, looks in working order…  _ ish, _ ” The Mistralian helpfully adds, “you might want to either put a glove on or wrap it in tape to keep the open hole from being jostled or anything like that”

“Yeah, no showering with this thing on, that’s for sure…” I chuckle to myself.

The next few minutes are spent mostly in silence, as Ren reaches the conclusion that it’s time for him to head back to the practice he shares with Velvet, and I reach the conclusion that I’ve had about all I can stomach of pretending to still be a normal, social person. I help him take his gear out to the snow machine and, with a polite wave he returns before firing up the motor, he’s off, disappearing in a puff of fresh powder into the treeline.

I spend a moment basking in the type of silence only the snow-covered landscape can truly afford, pulling deep, crisp lungfuls of of freezing air in, the golden hue of the sky signalling that it was just about time for the early winter sunset to bring in the colder temperatures of night. I’d have to add a few logs to the fire before long to keep the house nice and warm into the evening.

I could finish my workout now, but it’s lost its appeal to me, and grabbing a couple of beers out of the fridge makes me feel acutely guilty for thinking about it after Ren’s visit. I’m probably due to have a shower for the first time in days, the sweat from my interrupted gym routine now cooled and dried to my skin, but even that feels like it should be secondary to something, I just can’t quite place what.

Heading back inside, I add some kindling to the woodstove, then add a full log after a moment’s consideration, I may run hot, but I couldn’t just take myself into consideration right now.

For the first time in years, there was somebody other than myself depending on me, and for some reason that very concept that should absolutely mortify me, just…  _ doesn’t. _

Rooting around in a kitchen drawer, I manage to find a roll of electrical tape, and with it in hand, I quickly make my way upstairs. I crack the door to Ruby’s bedroom open again and am once again met with the familiar rhythm of steady breathing and light beeping. 

I take a seat on Ruby’s old and worn desk chair, swivelling around to observe the amber-eyed faunus as she rests before my eyes drift down to the roll of electrical tape, rotating it until I can find the edge of the adhesive strip and pull it loose.

There, in the calm shell of what was once my sister’s bedroom, I wind the tape around my damaged prosthetic hand and alternate my attention between blissful nothing, and genuine, fearful curiosity over what type of person I was going to meet when this amber-eyed faunus wakes back up.

If they were still a person at all… was I still enough of a person to help them?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a challenging chapter to put together. I'm sorry if the mini "Induced-coma" arc, that's gonna be taking up the next several chapters, feels like a holding pattern, I am genuinely intending it as world-building and character development.
> 
> Also, sass-master Ren is something I totally expect to see from now on given the character's development throughout season 8
> 
> Up next, more Blake dream goodness!
> 
> As always, kudos, comments and constructive criticism is love!

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be something a bit indulgent, but I wanted to try my hand at a canon divergent AU.
> 
> Yes it's a Bee fic! That said, there's a heavy emphasis on the psychological weight of the White Fang's methods and how they differed between Ghira's, Sienna's and Adam's ideology, as well as how the purer, more innocent elements present in a social movement could be skewed and bent for somebody's darker intentions. 
> 
> Also, even in canon there are a few moments that have bothered me in regards to how nobody ever seems to truly get held accountable for their disastrous decisions years prior to the show, yes that includes letting precious cinnamon roll Kali catch some scuffs too.
> 
> Now that we're all on the same page, I hope any readers stick around to see where I'm going with this, and as always kudos, comments and constructive criticisms are all very, VERY welcome and appreciated.


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